Are ALBA's institutes for high-school teachers proof of the "corruption of the academy"? Or are some people's reactions and suspicions proof of a particular pathology afflicting students of American Communism and Anti-Communism? An interesting discussion on an historians' listerv.
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Nick Ravich at Art21: "The biggest treat of the evening was the world premiere of the recently rediscovered 20-minute, silent 35mm film With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1937-38)."
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Amanda Hopkinson in The Independent: "Essentially, this is the account of one day in the first year of the war, 19th August 1936, when pyres of books were assembled and abused by posses of Falangists on the beaches of Galicia, and its aftermath."
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Graham Keeley in the London Times: "Today, for the first time, relatives of those held in the camps will discover how an army of faceless civil servants made sure that the books were balanced — evoking comparisons with the efficiency of their Nazi counterparts — when hundreds of files go on display at...
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Last month, the Los Angeles Times came in defense of Baltasar Garzón, the investigative magistrate from Spain who is threatened with suspension because of his attempt to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Francoism.
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El País highlights ALBA's investigative work on a gift for President Obama. Click here for an English translation.
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Last August, Matti Mattson became the third surviving Lincoln vet to acquire Spanish citizenship. (Video)
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The history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade has all but been forgotten in American high schools, with history textbooks barely making mention of these “premature anti-fascists.” But over the last two years, 33 students from the Bergen County Academies, a magnet high school in Hackensack, New Jersey, have opted to learn more about the...
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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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While the cellist Pablo Casals became an international symbol for Catalan culture and anti-Franco resistance, the reputation of his pupil Gaspar Cassadó is limited to the music world, and his national roots are often overlooked. Cassadó’s reputation never fully recovered from a public fallout with his maestro.
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Framing its protagonist’s journey to defend Spanish freedom as an extension of Palestinian Arab resistance at home, Hussein Yassin’s novel sheds light on the turbulent history and the political and social contexts of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine.
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When Cora Cuenca, an ALBA workshop alumna, teaches journalism to undergraduates in Seville, she invites them to consider the Spanish Civil War in personal terms. The legacies of the war, she writes, continue to weigh on Spain: “Education is political. There are no gray areas when dealing with fascism.”
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Twenty-seven years after the Dayton Peace Accords ended the bloody war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ethnic tensions in the region have been etched into law. The Center of Peacebuilding builds bridges through interethnic dialogue.
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Spanish conservatives who have rejected any accounting for Francoist crimes are nevertheless willing to make amends with the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled five centuries ago. The contradiction is only apparent.
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Here is the keynote address that Jeff Chang gave at ALBA's 2022 Bay Area Gala. Click here to see the videorecording.
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When 93-year-old Rosa Ruivenkamp died in 2019, in her nightstand her son found a blue notebook that had belonged to her brother Evert, who had been active in the resistance and was murdered by the Nazis in 1943. The notebook—which, fortunately was not thrown out—turned out to contain the diary notes Evert had written...
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Around the turn of the millennium, the association of British veterans of the Spanish Civil War merged with the Friends of the International Brigades to form the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT), ALBA’s sister organization in the UK. Like ALBA, the IBMT is dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the antifascist volunteers who...
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For more than 80 years, historians have ignored the important role played by thousands of women soldiers in the People’s Army of the Spanish Republic. A new dissertation takes a crucial first step to correct the record.
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Eighty-six years after the last soldiers in the Lincoln Brigade left Spain, their legacy continues. As veterans shared their stories with friends and family, they shaped the lives of their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. The family of Lincoln veteran Oiva Halonen, a Finnish-American volunteer, is one example.
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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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