"Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling" among leading Republicans, Ashley Parker and Michael Shear write in the NY Times: "leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is providing strong momentum for an...
Read more »
Clancy Sigal writes to the London Review of Books in response to Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s review of Richard Baxell's Unlikely Warriors:
The drift of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s piece about the Spanish Civil War is that it was ‘one wake-up call after another’, in which the untrained, poorly armed volunteers had their optimism shattered by...
Read more »
Our friends at SkyLight Pictures are writing with exciting news: The long awaited trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt begins today, March 19, 2012. The brutal Guatemalan dictator will be the first head of state to be tried for genocide in genuine proceedings in his own country’s justice system. Ríos Montt and another ex-General, José Mauricio Rodríguez...
Read more »
Dear ALBA, On behalf of the Broggi family (Dr. Moisés Broggi was my wife’s grandfather), I want to thank you for the thoughtful obituary published in The Volunteer. … As you know, the IB experience was a turning point in his medical career and his political awareness. He recalled that experience often, with clarity...
Read more »
History is being written in Guatemala as former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt is being put on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide. The New York Times' Elizabeth Malkin covers the latest developments today in a long story:
Guatemala’s justice system has begun a transformation. In a show of political will,...
Read more »
We just received the sad news that Spanish Civil War veteran George Sossenko has passed away. Born in Russia, George left his parent’s home in Paris, France, at age 17 to join those fighting against Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He initially went to the offices of the French Communist...
Read more »
Andrew Sullivan points to, and comments on, one of the more detailed and complex accounts of the precise relationship between the freshly appointed Pope Francis I and the Argentine military junta, provided by Democracy Now´s Amy Goodman in an interview with journalist Horacio Verbitsky. This is Sullivan; the quotes are from Goodman’s interview with...
Read more »
From the BBC (see video here):
A court in Buenos Aires has sentenced the former military ruler Reynaldo Bignone to life in jail for crimes against humanity committed when he was in power in the 1980s. The 85-year-old former general is already serving three other jail sentences for similar crimes. Mr...
Read more »
Alan Warren writes from Spain: This week marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Great Retreats. To remember the men who were killed in this Retreat I have posted to a piece of research on the unpublished autobiography of Fausto Vilar Esteban. His memoirs, as yet unpublished, are a wonderful source of...
Read more »
Nearly 200 people attended “George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, 75 Years On,” a conference held this past March 2 by the International Brigade Memorial Trust in Manchester, UK. Among the audience were George Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair and Quentin Kopp, son of Georges Kopp, Orwell’s commanding officer in Spain. The speakers included Richard...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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
Search the Database