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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John Hovan, one of the first veterans of the Lincoln Brigade to take advantage of the Spanish law granting citizenship to foreign volunteers of the International Brigades, died in Providence, Rhode Island, on March 27. He was 97.
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Racial equality and civil rights live at the core of the Lincoln Brigade. About 90 African Americans volunteered to serve in the ranks—as soldiers, drivers, mechanics, nurses, doctors, journalists, and social workers. The only prominent entertainer who visited the U.S. volunteers in Spain was Paul Robeson.
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Carl Geiser, political commissar of the Lincoln Battalion, prisoner of war held in Spain until 1939, and author of Prisoners of the Good Fight, left the letters he wrote to his family to the ALBA collection. The complete letters, edited by Peter N. Carroll and Fraser Ottanelli, have just published by Kent State University...
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The new Common Core Standards provide ALBA with an opportunity to help more high school teachers introduce the Spanish Civil War into their classes. Students will study history not by rote or memorization, but by confronting directly original primary documents.
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