Author Archive for Fraser Ottanelli

Book Review: A Memoir of Growing Up in an American Communist Family

December 29, 2018
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Book Review: <i>A Memoir of Growing Up in an American Communist Family</i>

History Lessons: A Memoir of Growing Up in an American Communist Family, by Dan Lynn Watt. Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2017, 351 pp.
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Letter from ALBA: The Case for Activist Alliances

February 27, 2018
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Letter from ALBA: The Case for Activist Alliances

This past January, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in the Second Women’s March. Their protest underscored that fighting misogyny, xenophobia, and exploitation requires broad alliances. As this issue of the Volunteer illustrates, the Women’s March follows a tradition of activist protest that has deep roots in our nation’s history.
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Labor Rights are Human Rights: ALBA to Honor Activist Organizers at May Event

February 27, 2018
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Labor Rights are Human Rights: ALBA to Honor Activist Organizers at May Event

This year’s recipient of the ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based labor and human rights organization founded in Florida in 1993.
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Letter from ALBA: Forever Activists

December 3, 2016
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Letter from ALBA: Forever Activists

It is raining in New York, the day after the election, as we go to press. On the streets, people go about their business with a grim expression and reddened eyes. History can weigh on us; it can shock us as it suddenly turns—but it also can guide us, showing us the path that...
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Letter from ALBA: A Busy Year

March 13, 2016
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Letter from ALBA: A Busy Year

The New Year has barely started and ALBA is already at work on an exciting number of programs and activities.
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Not all Heroes Wear Capes: Letter from ALBA

December 8, 2015
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Not all Heroes Wear Capes: Letter from ALBA

We have just returned from the Bay Area, where we joined close to 200 Lincoln family members, friends and supporters at our Annual Celebration honoring the Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley. We gathered for an afternoon of songs and to hear California writer and documentary photographer David Bacon, who described how his encounters with...
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Meet ALBA’s New Chair & Officers

June 11, 2015
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Meet ALBA’s New Chair & Officers

My formative experiences took place in Italy within a political culture deeply shaped by the values of international solidarity, social justice, and antifascism that motivated the women and men of the International Brigades.
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Book Review: Spain & the US Home Front

September 10, 2014
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<em>Book Review:</em> Spain & the US Home Front

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War. By Eric R. Smith. (Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 2013.)


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Kent State publishes Carl Geiser letters from Spain

December 19, 2013
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Kent State publishes Carl Geiser letters from Spain

Carl Geiser, political commissar of the Lincoln Battalion, prisoner of war held in Spain until 1939, and author of Prisoners of the Good Fight, left the letters he wrote to his family to the ALBA collection. The complete letters, edited by Peter N. Carroll and Fraser Ottanelli, have just published by Kent State University...
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The Lincolns as internationalists: A battalion of immigrant activists

March 15, 2013
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The Lincolns as internationalists: A battalion of immigrant activists

A survey of Lincoln veterans in the 1980s showed that 80 percent of the surviving volunteers were immigrants or children of immigrants. Some had participated in the mass migrations before WWI but many were relative newcomers who were "internationalists" rather than nationals.
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