ALBA Board Member Soledad Fox recently sent me this lovely dispatch about an excursion she led of US college students to the town of Gernika in the Basque Country. A professor at Williams College, Fox is the author of the outstanding book about Constancia de la Mora, In War and Exile: International Voice for...
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The Club Julio A. Mella in Spanish Harlem was named after the founder of Cuba’s Communist party. The exhibition “Nueva York: 1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society and Museo del Barrio), featured the original of this painting of that club by Henry Glintenkamp, as part of the exhibition’s final section. In this closing sequence...
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the curators of the museum show “Nueva York: 1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society, Museo del Barrio) used the Spanish Civil War in New York as a kind of provisional endpoint for the exhibition’s sweeping narrative about Spanish-speakers in Gotham. The exhibition showed how the war brought...
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According to today’s literary supplement of El País (Babelia), Jorge M. Reverte has published a new book in which he reconstructs the history of an important part of Francoist Spain’s support of Hitler and Nazism during World War II. The Spanish falangist José Luis Arrese proposed the name “División Azul” to refer to the...
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Several years ago, when the Museum of the City of New York was gearing up for its show “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” we realized that while we knew a good deal about how some communities or groups in New York had responded to the outbreak of the war in...
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Suze Rotolo, 1943 – 2011 The press is reporting the sad news of the death of Suze Rotolo, the American artist, teacher and political activist who was Bob Dylan’s companion and muse in the early 1960s. Rotolo is frequently credited with Dylan’s awakening to politics. According to one obituary she took the “then fairly...
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In 1940, Francisco Franco, using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, authored a treatment for a screenplay, titled “Raza : Story lines for a film script.” The following year, the script was made into a feature-length film, produced by the government. The original text and the 1941 film are invaluable documents, as they offer us...
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The thousands of documents, images and artifacts that make up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives can mean different things to different people. To the veterans and their immediate friends and family, the Archives are, among other things, a repository of the personal papers and effects of loved ones, a kind of extended and collective...
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Opening statement from the US Department of State, from the publication “The Spanish Government and the Axis,” a collection of the wartime correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was discovered in Germany in 1945: THE GOVERNMENTS of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America have exchanged views with regard to...
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I recently stumbled across a WikiLeaks-like March 1945 letter by FDR to the new US Ambassador in Madrid, saying that the US government will hold its nose and maintain relations with the Franco regime, but that it repudiates the origins and ideology of the regime. Little did I know that this brief archival document...
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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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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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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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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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