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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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 New York Times (p. 4) explained on the next day that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the...
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Tampa, Florida was a sleepy town of just a few thousand inhabitants when, in 1885, the Spanish cigarmakers Vicente Martínez Ybor and Ignacio Haya decided to relocate their “clear Havana tobacco” cigar factories to the area from Key West. (They had relocated in 1869 from Havana to Key West to avoid both the high...
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Another somewhat unlikely focus of anti-fascist activism during the Spanish Civil War was Barre, Vermont. The town was home to a significant population of working class Spaniards most of whom had left their native region of Cantabria (Santander) during the first decades of the twentieth century to work in the granite quarries and stone...
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The 2007 museum show and catalog “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War” broke new ground by focusing on the way individuals and communities in New York city responded to the outbreak, conduct, and outcome of the Spanish Civil War. And while New York was a particularly active site for all kinds...
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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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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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The Spanija series translates select 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 Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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Please find attached photos of my visits to the graves of Lester Rowlson and Tersil Obriot last weekend. I left a brigade flag and a fresh white rose at each. ,,, I was also proud to include aspects of my Clapton CFC scarf; you might have heard of this small football club in London that...
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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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