Dean Burrier Sanchis is a Spanish teacher and soccer coach in Elk Grove, Illinois. He also has a deep personal connection to the Spanish Civil War. Dean has spent several years uncovering and documenting the life story of his grandfather and Lincoln veteran Vicente Sanchis Amades.
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This year’s George Watt Essay contest for the best student writing on the Spanish Civil War is receiving well-deserved attention from around the world as a record number of students submitted their essays and poetry, nearly doubling the previous number of submissions last year.
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Herman Schmidt of Charlotte Court House, Virginia, talks about how he learned about ALBA and how the lessons of the Lincoln Brigade have informed his politics. He is pictured here with his Triumph motorcycle. Herman rides, camps and hikes across Virginia and as far away as Utah.
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The 2017 George Watt Essay Prize for the best writing on the Spanish Civil War received a record number of submissions. Students from Canada, Egypt, and 18 U.S. states submitted essays, poems, and stories for this year’s annual prizes.
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George Snook is an award-winning history teacher at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For over 25 years he has inspired his students to engage history by doing their own research. The Spanish Civil War and the experiences of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade play a central role in his classes. An alum...
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Chris Brooks is the driving force behind ALBA’s online biographical database of Lincoln Brigade veterans. His countless hours of research and correspondence have produced a comprehensive and accessible collection that has put a story and a face to thousands of veterans.
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Two undergraduates and one graduate student have won the George Watt Memorial Essay Award with outstanding projects on the Cold War, the Franco Regime, and refugee aid.
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Kate Doyle, winner of the ALBA-Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, now serves on ALBA’s Board of Governors where she leverages her formidable expertise. Aaron Retish speaks with her about her work uncovering U.S. involvement in Latin American human rights violations.
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Award-winning author Adam Hochschild speaks in Detroit and two Wayne State students receive Lincoln Veterans scholarships.
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Richard Bermack is a documentary photographer and writer who has worked primarily for labor unions, including SEIU, the UAW, and the ILWU. In addition to his work on radical and labor history, he has written about and photographed workers involved in children and family services, welfare reform, aiding people with disabilities, and health care...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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