Spanish Trenches: The Minds and Deeds of the Irish who Fought for the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War, by Barry McLoughlin and Emmet O’Connor. University College of Dublin Press, 2020. 400 pp. $35.
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Since 2014, volunteers have visited the graves of Lincolns and honored them on Memorial Day by putting down a simple white rose and an International Brigades flag.  This year, ALBA helped advertise this project through a link to the online version of the Volunteer Newsletter1.   The response from that approach has been rewarding and...
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Due to the untiring work of Ray Hoff,  ALBA’s volunteer data base now has three new photographs. Hoff who identified and contacted family members of Isadore “Jack” Ehrenberg, and Robert Gavin and his younger brother Eugene Victor Gavin. These families provided the photographs.  Family members are encouraged to review the data entries and provide...
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Veteran Joe Brandt’s pamphlet Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism. 1936-1939 was published by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades in 1979. It was the first attempt to document the history of African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.  The Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and...
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2024 Update – Additional photographs were located in the three years since this piece was posted.  Other photographs are now in the database.   African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’’ll Do” by Danny Duncan Collum was published in 1991.  In the thirty years since the book was originally...
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Volunteer for Liberty V. 1, No. 3, April 1938 Commander Douglas Earl Seacord by Doug Roach Half a world lies between the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts and the Jarama valley. Provincetown, first landing place of the Pilgrims in their search for liberty is – a summer resort frequented by artists, writers and professional people....
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I am searching for information about Morton ‘Vic’ Vicker.  I have reason to believe he was in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.  I did not meet Vic until November of 1969 in Aguacate, Cuba, on the first Venceremos Brigade.*  We bunked together, cut cane together, and spent a lot of time talking.  I was...
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The University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies added part of Dr. Joseph Butwin’s oral history project to its Digital Jewish Studies online collection in 2018.  Butwin noted that “initiative” for the project came the “Vets themselves.” The web pages discuss the project’s history and offers individual pages on five veterans: George Watt,...
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Originally published in The Volunteer, V. 1, No. 1 1978. September 21, 1938, Hill 281, Sierra de Caballs. “The men of the Botwin and Shevchenko companies distinguished themselves in particular by their heroic defense of every inch of ground. They resisted to the last grenade when the enemy broke into their trenches. Nearly all...
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Edward Muscala’s hastily scrawled graffiti on the wall of the Hermitage of San Gregoria de Aguaviva during the battle of Teruel was preserved by the town.  Ann Marti first reported on the inscription in her article In the Footsteps of the Lincoln-Battalion.  This relic of the war was recently spray painted by vandals. Town...
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