Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War is a collection of the first 10 Len Crome annual lectures sponsored by the IBMT. Antifascistas is more of a picture book designed to accompany a traveling exhibition honoring the role of British and Irish volunteers in Spain.
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Lincoln vet Peter Schemrock died on June 24 in southern California, a few weeks before his 100th birthday. Peter was born on August 17, l910, in Dunbar, Pennsylvania. His family went back to Croatia (former Yugoslavia) when he was about four years old. Peter returned to the United States as a young man during...
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My father, Norman (Nathan) Berkowitz, died peacefully at the age of 96 on July 30, 2010. After not being able to speak for 36 hours, Norman rallied and spoke continuously for 30 minutes. His final words were directed to his grandson and they were, surprisingly, entirely in Spanish. Not surpisingly, they were about his...
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Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Nick Tosches. New York Review of Books/paperback. On his way out of Spain in 1938, Bill Gresham, a Baltimore-born volunteer in the John Brown Artillery company of the International Brigades, heard a strange story from one of his comrades, Joseph “Doc” Halliday, about an alcoholic carnival...
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La Batalla Del Jarama, by Jesús González de Miguel, and Los Internacionales: English Speaking Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Antonio R. Celada, Manuel González de la Aleja, and Daniel Pastor García.
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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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Manus O'Riordan, Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, writes about "The Radical Paul Robeson" and the Spanish Civil War in The Tribune. Read the article here.
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Since 2014, volunteers have visited the graves of Lincolns and honored them on Memorial Day by putting down a simple white rose and an International Brigades flag. This year, ALBA helped advertise this project through a link to the online version of the Volunteer Newsletter1. The response from that approach has been rewarding and...
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Due to the untiring work of Ray Hoff, ALBA’s volunteer data base now has three new photographs. Hoff who identified and contacted family members of Isadore “Jack” Ehrenberg, and Robert Gavin and his younger brother Eugene Victor Gavin. These families provided the photographs. Family members are encouraged to review the data entries and provide...
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Veteran Joe Brandt’s pamphlet Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism. 1936-1939 was published by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades in 1979. It was the first attempt to document the history of African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and...
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African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’’ll Do” by Danny Duncan Collum was published in 1991. In the thirty years since the book was originally published researchers have identified additional African American volunteers and removed others added to the list in error. The updated names are listed below along...
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Volunteer for Liberty V. 1, No. 3, April 1938 Commander Douglas Earl Seacord by Doug Roach Half a world lies between the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts and the Jarama valley. Provincetown, first landing place of the Pilgrims in their search for liberty is – a summer resort frequented by artists, writers and professional people....
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I am searching for information about Morton ‘Vic’ Vicker. I have reason to believe he was in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. I did not meet Vic until November of 1969 in Aguacate, Cuba, on the first Venceremos Brigade.* We bunked together, cut cane together, and spent a lot of time talking. I was...
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A preview of a Q&A with Robin D.G. Kelley that will appear in the December issue of The Volunteer.
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Guardian Newspapers has published two reviews of the new book by Giles Tremlett, ‘The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War’. On Saturday 3 October, The Guardian’s review by Dan Hancox gave the following misleading impression: ‘The brigades drew an astonishing array of international literary figures – Orwell, Hemingway, Spender, Auden’. None of...
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The University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies added part of Dr. Joseph Butwin’s oral history project to its Digital Jewish Studies online collection in 2018. Butwin noted that “initiative” for the project came the “Vets themselves.” The web pages discuss the project’s history and offers individual pages on five veterans: George Watt,...
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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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