The Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) has expressed concern about the inexplicable delay affecting article 33 of the 2022 Law of Democratic Memory, which allows descendants of International Brigade volunteers to apply for Spanish Citizenship. The 166 applications AABI has helped prepare to date are in bureaucratic limbo as long as the Boletín...
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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On Election Day, ALBA held its annual workshop for New York teachers on “The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond.” The full-day workshop drew participants not just from New York City but also from other parts of the United States, as well as Spain...
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This election season, ALBA joined 18by Vote, winner of the 2024 ALBA/Puffin Award, in a campaign to draw young voters to the polls. ALBA’s contribution included a social media blitz and video messages from members of the ALBA board and honorary board, including Karen Nussbaum.
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ALBA’s new film series, hosted as part of the Peter N. Carroll Antifascist Education Fund, continues on December 18, at 4 pm ET, with a discussion of Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), led by Lisa Berger, a Barcelona-based producer who collaborated with Loach on the film. Anyone registering for the event will receive...
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In late 2023, we sent out a call to the ALBA community requesting short videos from grandchildren of Brigadistas. Given the quality of the testimonies, we decided to create an 18-minute compilation, which will be premiered on December 7.
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As a gift to those who donate $125 or more to ALBA, we offer a facsimile reproduction of the 1938 pamphlet Letters from Spain by Joe Dallet to his Wife. The pamphlet includes 30 letters from Joe to Katherine Puening-Dallet relaying his experiences in Spain and his hopes for a better world. After Joe’s...
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Brooklyn high school student Iago Macknik-Conde, who last year was named a History Day finalist with a project on the Lincoln Brigade, won the most recent National History Day competition with his research on the contribution of the Spaniard Bernardo de Gálvez to the United States’ independence movement. Profiled in the national Spanish newspaper...
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Catalonia’s Alvah Bessie Program Reports Progress An article in The Guardian on May 29 reported that the Alvah Bessie Program, through which the government of Catalonia seeks to locate, exhume, identify, and repatriate the remains of International Brigade Volunteers who died during the Spanish Civil War, has been making strides. By now, the program...
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ALBA’s Monthly Film Discussion Series Kicks Off On July 16, ALBA hosted the first session of its new online film discussion series, sponsored by the Peter N. Carroll Anti-Fascist Education Fund, and geared toward both teachers and the general public. The series features in-depth discussions on important Spanish-Civil-War-themed films. Each session is led by...
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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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