Yesterday the Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón brought a case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg challenging the lawfulness of his criminal prosecution in Spain for having opened an investigation into serious crimes committed during the Franco era, following a request by families and representatives of victims of the regime,. The...
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Marjorie Cohn, who gave ALBA's annual Susman lecture last month, calls for the US to stop bombing Libya:
There is no doubt that Muammar Qaddafi has been brutally repressing Libyans in order to maintain his power. But the purpose of the United Nations is to maintain international peace and security. The...
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Irene Filip has just published a detailed essay on Dr. Hans Kaiser and his wife Dora, the two Austrian Jewish volunteers who helped run the International Brigade hospital at Benissa. Read the article, which has appeared in the yearbook of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, here (in German).
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Visiting Chile, President Obama stopped short of offering an apology for the US role in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973, leading to the bloody military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet--an episode about which then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2003 "it is not a part of American history that...
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Alan Entin, nephew of Bernard "Butch" Entin, has been working with his local radio station on a documentary about his uncle: "Uncle Bernard and The Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in the series "Hidden Histories" (27 min, available in mp3 here). Also in Hidden Histories, three 2-minute segments on the Spanish Civil War with Jack...
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Ten days ago, at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva, Switzerland, the screening of Impunity, the new documentary by Juan José Lozano and Hollman Morris on the peace process in Colombia (website; trailer), Baltasar Garzón joined in a panel discussion on the question of impunity in relation to...
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Tiempo de Historia reports that a digital copy of the personal archive of José Díaz Ramos, secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party from 1932 to 1942, has just been donated to the Centro de Memoria Histórica in Salamanca:
La donación de este fondo para el Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica...
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This month marks the one-year anniversary of the online Volunteer and the ALBA blog. Some statistics: Total number of visits: 27,229. Total number of page views: 58,932. Unique visitors: 18,481, from 141 countries. Most read pages, posts and articles: ALBA Blog, Helen Graham, Cartier Bresson, Picasso and Delaprée, Oliver Law, Video,...
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Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, the pair of Catalan documentary filmmakers that brought us Les fosses del silenci (The Spanish Holocaust, view part 1- part 2), Els nens perduts del franquisme (The Lost Children of Francoism, part 1 - part 2), and Memòria per llei (Memory by Law, view) returned last month...
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The blog of the Pabellón de la República, at the University of Barcelona, just announced the catalogization of a stunning collection of 4,500 photographs shot between 1934 and 1938 by legendary photographer Agustí Centelles, collected in a 133-page scrapbook assembled in the late 1970s by the photographer himself, for the purpose of establishing...
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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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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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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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