Abe & Jack, Milt, Moe, Dave…   They were not my family. They distrusted strangers. I could only approach them slowly, these Americans who had volunteered to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War.   They lost, bad guys won—they bore failure like primal sin or first love that comes and goes, never leaves....
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How can we leverage our educational system into a building block for an anti-fascist front? This has long been the key question behind ALBA’s work.
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Sanctuary   The village creek serpentines to open seas where I stand all day at the ocean shore, feeling the Earth’s core tremble.   Sailor Melville got it right, picturing landlubbers lined at water’s edge looking outward on holidays chary of wet feet.   I’m of the coastal breed, fear-fed by tsunamis, yellow signs...
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Dear Friends, More than 50 New York City high school students, together with their history teachers, attended our annual event on May 5. It’s been a while since we had so many young faces in the audience. Along with some 150 other attendees, they saw the Immigration Justice Campaign receive the ALBA/Puffin Award for...
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Among the dozens of primary source documents in the resource binder distributed to the teachers who participate in ALBA’s teaching institutes are a letter that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to the U.S. ambassador in Madrid in March 1945, and the transcript of a conversation four years later between Milt Wolff, the last commander...
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Anonymous The old Communist behind the bar is decanting rot-gut red into green bottles, pours me a taste. He’d fought in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade and in the big war that followed. He has stories. Oral history we call it: I want his past, he hopes for my future. He pours, I drink....
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Reflecting a growing interest among Americans about the history of fascism and anti-fascism, and resulting struggles for the rights of citizens and civilians in wartime, ALBA launched a three-day symposium for high school teachers of New York City to explore these themes using primary sources that remain accessible and challenging for their students.
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Trump’s election creates new challenges for everyone involved in history teaching. What is it like to teach history when the nation’s president appears to chronically ignore factual evidence? What’s the task ahead?
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I wasn’t even born, never saw a soldier point a rifle into the face of a woman, her hair beginning to gray, run red. I witness from a distance the dark-eyed girl in Capa’s photo snuggled on a rice sack in a train station. Her pose wistful: to where railroad tracks began and will...
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Writers and soldiers alike saw Spain as the first battlefield of World War II. In the title essay of his new book, excerpted here, historian Peter N. Carroll traces the war’s legacy, from the shocking bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian air forces to the attacks on civilians and...
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