In his massive novel La noche de los tiempos, Antonio Muñoz Molina crafts an unforgettable fictional character named Judith Biely. The daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Judith grew up in New York, did doctoral work in Spanish Literature at Columbia, and traveled to Spain in the early 1930s to conduct doctoral research. In...
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I have just heard the heartbreaking news of the death of Michael Nash, Director of the Tamiment Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. Over the years I had the good fortune of being able to work with Mike on a number of ALBA-related projects and on several occasions we co-taught...
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The photo show that I curated –La colonia: A photo album of Spanish immigrants in New York, 1898 – 1945– is currently on display in León, Spain, thanks to the city of León and the University of Washington, Seattle, which has a program and a site there. The show originally opened in New York,...
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In a recent exchange with a commenter on this blog, I mentioned how sometimes, when posting here, I feel like a hopeful child throwing a message in a bottle into the vast cybersea. And occasionally I experience the thrill of confirming that the message has arrived to an intended (if unknown) recipient. Those moments...
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On March 27, 1938, Avelino González Mallada, former mayor of the Asturian city of Gijón, died in a car crash on a country road in Woodstock, Virginia. The next day, The New York Times explained that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the Department of Labor after...
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It wasn’t until I began scanning the old crumbling panoramic photograph that I started to become suspicious. The image is spectacular: a large crowd of Spanish immigrants poses for a picture at some kind of picnic. The owner of the photo and several of the Spaniards I’ve been interviewing in Monterey told me that...
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I’m back in Monterey, California, following up on the story of the Spanish immigrants who settled in this area in the early decades of the 20th century. I’m constantly surprised both by the ubiquity of photographs, stories, and objects related to the Republic and the Spanish Civil War, and by the relative oblivion into...
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I had the pleasure of visiting the ALBA archives a couple of weeks ago with Alan Levine, a New York-based civil rights attorney with a longstanding interest in the Lincolns. In the early 1960s, fresh out of Yale Law School, Alan took a job on Wall Street, a decision which he soon regretted. In...
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En inglés aquí. 1937. Una gira campestre en Toro Park, a 15 kilómetros de la ciudad de Monterey, California. Varios centenares de inmigrantes españoles que se han establecido en la Península de Monterey y en el Valle de Santa Clara disfrutan de un ameno “picnic”. Pero los puños en alto nos recuerdan que en...
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En español aquí. 1937. A picnic in Toro Park, 9 miles from Monterey, California. Several hundred Spaniards from the Monterey Peninsula and the Santa Clara Valley enjoy a pleasurable get-together. But the raised clenched fists remind us that a war is going on in Spain, and that this social gathering 6,000 miles away in...
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Nobody remembers Lloyd Mallan. I came across his name while writing a book on poet- playwright Federico García Lorca’s iconic afterlife. Mallan’s piece on the poet’s assassination, published in 1939, was instrumental in spreading to the U.S. and Canada a highly embellished narrative of poetic martyrdom that helped shape the public image of Lorca....
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For an English translation of this article, see here.
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On May 30, 1937, the Republican freighter Ciudad de Barcelona was hit by a torpedo fired by a lurking Nationalist submarine. The torpedo tore a gaping hole in the ship and it rapidly sank. A Republican seaplane drove the submarine away with a depth charge attack, then landed and began rescuing men in the...
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Dr. Irving Busch (1896-1960), a graduate of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, volunteered to serve in Spain with the American Medical Bureau. In Spain, he served with the Republican Medical Services. Both before and after Spain Busch was an amateur photographer and he carried his camera along with him. After his death...
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The picture of a young man in a jaunty hat and a big smile stared out of the 1978 issue of The Volunteer. The photo was accompanied by a request for information about Sidney Lorraine who died in Spain during the course of The Retreats. There is no evidence of any replies. Sidney Hotchkiss...
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Many American veterans went on to serve in WWII and Korea. This list is a work in progress. Those marked with an “*” were killed during the war. Office of Strategic Services Aalto, William Oliver WWII US Army, joined December 1941 served as 1st SGT transfer to OSS April 12, 1942; Dismissed after he...
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Eddie O’Neill was born in the same County Tyrone neighborhood as the poet Charlie Donnelly (1914-1937), who was killed in action at Jarama while serving as a platoon leader with the James Connolly Section of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Inspired by the sacrifice of his fellow countryman and fellow Irish Socialist Republican, Eddie set...
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“A prominent competitive player in the United States gave a series of lectures and played over famous games from the past. To hear him talking—in our squalid surroundings—with such knowledge about a game once played by Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, was an uplifting and inspiring experience.” In his memoir To...
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With the submission of the August batch freedom of information act (FOIA) requests ALBA will have filed for over 1,000 passport records of American volunteers. Due to the ongoing pandemic responses to the submissions have been minimal. However, we did receive three responses this week. This is only the second batch received in the...
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A short video of the graves visited in 2021. Memorial Day is the day traditionally set aside to remember Americans who served in the military. And, yet, Americans who went to Spain to fight fascism are rarely, if ever, included in the remembrances on this day. The Lincoln Battalion Memorial...
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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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