Our colleague Tony Geist—the longest serving ALBA Board member, professor of Spanish at the University of Washington, author and translator—has been awarded one of Spain’s highest civil honors, membership into the Order of Isabella the Catholic with the first-class title of Caballeros de la Gran Cruz de Oficial, or Knights of the Officer’s Cross....
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Del Berg, the last known surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died peacefully in his California home on Sunday, February 28. He was 100 years old. Berg was born in 1915 outside of Los Angeles to a family of poor farm workers. His mother’s line had long since emigrated from Bavaria while his...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA, www.alba-valb.org) mourns the loss of Michael Ratner, a longtime defender of civil liberties in the United States and abroad.
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The torch has been passed. Eighty years after the Spanish Civil War inspired volunteers from 52 countries to challenge the spread of international fascism, no American veterans of that struggle are alive to bear witness, but their spirit and commitment to social justice, human rights, and anti-fascism lives on in the work of current...
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Efforts are ongoing to address the deterioration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade monument in San Francisco. After initial problems of deliberate vandalism were dealt with, the elements began to take their toll on the structure. However, we have been involved in extensive conversations with different offices of the city of San Francisco for well...
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ALBA’s Teaching Institutes continue to break new ground across the United States, reaching more teachers in new communities, expanding opportunities, and seeing exciting results.
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On May 7, the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Right Activism—a cash tribute of $100,000—honored two courageous journalists, Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, for their dedication to exposing corruption, violence, and the abuse of power which are routinely ignored by mainstream media. They do this work under life-threatening conditions of danger and risk. The day’s...
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This January 19th, exhumation procedures began to recover the remains of Timoteo Mendieta, murdered by the Franco regime in 1939. In 2013, his daughter Ascensión testified before María Servini, the Argentine judge who has investigated Franco’s crimes against humanity since 2010. On Servini’s orders, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory took charge of the exhumation, helped...
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The 2016 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be shared by journalists Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, who have dedicated their careers to exposing corruption, violence and abuse of power. Award ceremony: NYC, Saturday, May 7 (tickets)
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About twenty New York city teachers took part in a four-session ALBA workshop this winter, a special initiative sponsored by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the Puffin Foundation. The massive snowstorm a few weeks ago forced some scrambling and rescheduling, but in the end, the...
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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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Adrian Pole’s sharp-eyed and sensitive new book notices what so many historians have missed about the International Brigades: that this army was filled with Spanish recruits. Interactions with everyday Spaniards made up a substantial chunk of foreign soldiers’ days in the rearguard. Due to the high mortality of Brigade units, maintaining fighting readiness demanded...
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Amirah Inglis’s (1926-2015) collection of photographs assembled for her research on Australians in the Spanish Civil War (1987) is posted on JSTOR’s website. The collection includes 119 images varying from pamphlet covers, post cards, to photographs of volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic at home, and of volunteers who went to Spain. Inglis planned...
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After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
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Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
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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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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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