Almost 80 years after her father Timoteo’s violent death during the Franco dictatorship, Ascensión Mendieta has finally been able to re-bury his remains. In her 90s now, Mendieta last saw Timoteo when she was 13. A labor leader in the tiny village of Sacedón, east of Madrid, he was picked up from the family...
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“America & World Fascism,” ALBA Teaching Institutes program, launches a statewide series at the Ohio Council for the Social Studies (OCSS) Meeting in September, with professional development workshops following month for teachers in Cleveland and Bowling Green. Besides exploring U.S. and World History topics from the Spanish Civil War and World War II, this...
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Every day we are inspired by the millions in this country and around the world who engage in acts of resistance against racists and oppressors. Like many of you, we worried about the recent elections in France and the Netherlands and were relatively relieved by the outcome. We were also thrilled to see the...
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On April 16, Òscar Camps, Gerard Canals, and Laura Lanuza of Proactiva Open Arms joined ALBA’s annual celebration at the Museum of the City of New York to receive the 2017 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Before the main award ceremony, they were interviewed by Emma Daly of Human Rights Watch. The main...
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A longtime ALBA friend, Herb was also a member of The Jarama Society, generously leaving ALBA in his plans to help continue our commitment to social activism.
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ALBA notes with sadness the death of former executive director Marvin E. Gettleman. He was 83. A historian of the American left, he taught for many years at Polytechnic University, well-known as editor of Vietnam: History, Documents, Opinions. He is survived by former Board member, historian Ellen Schrecker.
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We live in interesting times. Hundreds of thousands of women and men across the country and around the world are engaging in acts of resistance against oppression and bigotry, and demonstrating for democracy and human rights. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives stands with this broad progressive movement. Following in the footsteps of those who...
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On Sunday, April 16 (details | tickets), the annual ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be granted to Proactiva Open Arms (POA), a humanitarian aid organization based in Badalona (Catalonia) dedicated to rescuing refugees who take to the sea in an attempt to flee war, persecution, and poverty, and to reach the...
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Dear Editor, After 25 years of receiving and enjoying The Volunteer I was saddened by the unbalanced and misleading article by Eric R. Smith entitled How to understand the Catalan Independence Movement published in No. 3 of Vol. XXXIII. Though I’m too far removed from my research to properly comment on the simplistic statements...
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This November, ALBA organized three full-day professional development institutes for high school teachers in New York City, New Jersey, and Seattle, Washington, led by Peter N. Carroll, James D. Fernández, Anthony Geist, and Gina Herrmann. The institutes gathered close to 80 teachers to work on lesson plans incorporating the history of the Spanish Civil...
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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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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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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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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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