Mike Elkin, writing for Newsweek, tackles Spain's lingering legacy of violence committed during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Mike Elkin, writing for Newsweek, tackles Spain's lingering legacy of violence committed during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
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Dear Friends,
This has been an ambitious year for ALBA as we continue to grow our human rights initiatives and strengthen our educational programming. We recently wrapped up our Third Annual Human Rights Documentary Film Series, Impugning Impunity, at Pace University. It was a terrific showing that included powerful films on a range of...
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ALBA is proud to announce a new website for high school teachers in Social Studies, Spanish, and English Language Arts, featuring resources and lesson plans aligned with the Common Core State Standards.
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ALBA’s third human rights film series, held at Pace University this past November, featured eight compelling documentaries. Richard Rowley’s Dirty Wars (2013) lays bare the dirty little secret of America’s War on Terror with the help of investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill; Tatiana Huezo’s The Tiniest Place (2012) tells the story of Cinquera, a village literally wiped off the official...
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Alasdair Fotheringham, writing for The Independent, explores a curiously uninformative official heritage trail--the first of its kind established by a governmental entity--commemorating a Spanish Civil War battlefield outside of Madrid.
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ALBA PROUDLY PRESENTS: A screening of the passionate musical Goodbye Barcelona In 1936, as fascism sweeps across Europe, one country reaches out in its hour of need…and tens of thousands of ordinary people make an extraordinary decision to help. More than 42,000 travel to Spain from all over the world, risking their lives for the freedom of...
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This weekend! Impugning Impunity: A Human Rights Documentary Film Series with eight powerful and inspiring films exploring issues of governmental abuse, historical memory, civil rights an racial inequality.
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Our friend Manus O’Riordan sends along the following: PHILOMENA, SEAN ROSS ABBEY and ANNETTE v HILDEGARDE Michael A. Hess had been Deputy Chief Counsel of the US Republican National Committee under President Reagan and had risen to Chief Counsel under President Bush Senior by the time of his death in 1995. So, what...
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Our compañeros at the Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) write with an announcement: On Saturday November 9 AABI will perform the annual celebration in honor of the International Brigades to mark the 77th anniversary of his arrival in Madrid to assist in its defense. The main event will be the unveiling of a plaque to...
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The family of John Dos Passos, the American novelist and public intellectual who began visiting Spain in the 1920s and was deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War, has announced the launch of a new website dedicated to the author's legacy: www.johndospassos.com. A press release about the launch is here.
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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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Adrian Pole’s sharp-eyed and sensitive new book notices what so many historians have missed about the International Brigades: that this army was filled with Spanish recruits. Interactions with everyday Spaniards made up a substantial chunk of foreign soldiers’ days in the rearguard. Due to the high mortality of Brigade units, maintaining fighting readiness demanded...
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Amirah Inglis’s (1926-2015) collection of photographs assembled for her research on Australians in the Spanish Civil War (1987) is posted on JSTOR’s website. The collection includes 119 images varying from pamphlet covers, post cards, to photographs of volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic at home, and of volunteers who went to Spain. Inglis planned...
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After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
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Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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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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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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