I’m feeling a bit guilty for having subjected the students in my graduate seminar this week to the viewing of all 77 minutes of Defenders of the Faith, a pro-Franco documentary filmed between 1936 and 1938 by the American journalist Russell Palmer. The film is narrated by Palmer himself. To assuage my conscience, I’ve...
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While poking around ancestry.com, I somehow ended up in a cache of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration –“Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835 – 1974- Spain, 1930-1939.” As you can imagine, each document there is the germ of a novel or film, and, not surpisingly, there are a significant...
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Two-thirds of the way into Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, two Mexican intellectuals comment on the donation of that vast archive to the International Center of Photography in New York. Photographer Pedro Meyer openly says...
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A beautiful album, courtesy of the AABI (Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales) with images from: Inauguration of the monument to the International Brigades at Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria. Concert/homage to the IB Visit to the Fuencarral Cemetery Visit to the Jarama battlefield Luncheon at Rivas Vaciamadrid in honor of the IB. See album...
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Translation of remarks made by the President of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), Ana Pérez, at the inauguration of the monument to the International Brigades at Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain. October 22, 2011. A monument to the International Brigades is, above all, a monument to international solidarity. And in this...
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Today,a group of about twenty “Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” and three ALBA Board members (J. Fernández, G. Herrman and Marina Garde), visited the Jarama battlefield. From the vantage point of an appropriately makeshift memorial to British volunteer Kit Conway and other fallen British volunteers, we surveyed the valley and points of...
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On October 22, 1936, exactly 75 years ago, President Largo Caballero signed the decree which brought into existence the International Brigades. Today, several hundred people, including four IB veterans, three representatives of ALBA, and a considerable contingent of Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, attended the inauguration of a monument to the...
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A hundred-year-old man is helped up on to a plastic milk crate, and prepares to address the crowd at Occupy Wall Street. “Mic check” shouts the facilitator, and her words are repeated by the crowd in a kind of reverse echo, moving in concentric circles from the milk crate out in all directions. The...
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(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) Review published in American Studies, Vol 50, Nos 3/4, Fall/Winter, 2009. This is an impressive piece of scholarship, which combines admirable bibliographic and archival research with clear, engaging prose. Throughout the book’s five main chapters, Schreiber painstakingly reconstructs the biographical and artistic trajectories of a talented and diverse...
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On the Norwegian island of Utoya, scene of that horrific massacre of young members of the Labor Party by a right-wing Christian terrorist, there is a plaque, tacked on to a tree, honoring the four Norwegian members of the International Brigades who were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, the young campers had...
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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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