With the passing of William Loren Katz, the world has lost a great historian and educator. Katz helped reshape the way American history is taught, publishing over 40 books on African American, Native American, and progressive history and editing two major series totaling over 200 books on anti-slavery resistance and African American thought. His lifetime...
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The International Brigades were a hybrid bunch: multi-ethnic, multi-national—and multi-lingual: not everybody spoke everybody’s language. This posed serious organizational challenges for the Republican war effort.
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The Record of John Gates at the Front, as described by his by his Brigade Commander The Volunteer for Liberty, V1, No. 20, October 25, 1937. 86 Brigada Mixta – Mando The adjutant Political Commissar of the 86th Brigade, Comrade John Gates, was one of the organizers of the 20th International Battalion that left...
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Spanish Republican Exile / Intimate Portraits: Sender Barayón. A Trip into the Light (2019) Venue: KJCC Auditorium // 53 Washington Square South, NYC November 19, 2019 7:00 pm Sender Barayón. A Trip to the Light (2019) Documentary , Dir. Luis Olano Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes In English US premiere From the Spanish Civil...
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Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 3, 18 de Julio 1937, p. 4-5 The comrades fighting in the front lines know better than anybody else the importance of having a well organized Medical Corps. Both the health of the soldier in everyday life and the condition of the same man, when wounded...
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Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 2, 13 de Julio 1937, p. 3 Lieutenant Ronald Dart served as a combat officer in the American Air Force for seven years. In sympathy with the workers of the world, he resigned his commission. When the call to arms was sounded by the anti-fascists, he...
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Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 1, 2 de Junio 1937, p. 3 The English Company of the 20th Battalion has had its baptism. Isolated from the main body of the Battalion, waiting for relief from day to day, the company maintained its morale, held its discipline. It learned and it has...
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The Volunteer, v2, no. 2, January 13, 1938 BALLAD OF TERUEL The General stood in Teruel Whence not a few had fled; He called his brave defenders up And unto them he said: “Soldiers, today we stand as one To crush the wicked Red....
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The Volunteer for Liberty, p. 10.v.2, no. 2, January 13, 1938. Cyprus, a small island in the Eastern Mediterranean, has a population of 340,000. Cyprus, now a British colony, has been under British imperialist domination since 1878. The foreign ruler subjects the people to a life of degradation and misery. ...
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Lloyd Edward Johnson was 41-years old when he arrived in Spain in April 1937. He was the oldest of four sons born to Norwegian immigrants Seavert and Nesina Johnson. Johnson was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He applied for a position as an apprentice electrician with the Northern Pacific Railway Company when...
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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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On returning to Canada from the Spanish Civil War, Jim Higgins was branded a communist, hounded by the RCMP, and welcomed by his Lincoln Battalion comrades when he sought refuge in New York. In his soon-to-be-published book, he writes, “It rained like hell but I was very happy.”
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Jack Mayerhofer is the newest member of the ALBA Board of Governors and its freshest face. A leading figure in the protection human rights and the development of education programs to prevent mass atrocities across the globe, Jack holds a B.S. in French and Applied Linguistics from Penn State University and an M.S. in...
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Lollie Butler is a Fellow in Literature, granted by the Arizona Commission for the Arts.
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What Lincoln vet Len Olson taught his daughter Hannah. “Think of all the work that was done to this thing by someone’s hands.”
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Among the thousands of Spanish workers who arrived in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century were many with radical traditions rooted in their homeland, which at the time boasted one of the world’s most vibrant anarchist movements. They created scores of cultural and mutual aid societies in cities and rural...
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Marina Ginestà became world-famous late in life when a stunning photograph taken at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War surfaced in a Spanish archive. With the help of Marina’s son, the journalist Yvonne Scholten uncovers new details of Ginestà’s adventurous life.
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Abe & Jack, Milt, Moe, Dave… They were not my family. They distrusted strangers. I could only approach them slowly, these Americans who had volunteered to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War. They lost, bad guys won—they bore failure like primal sin or first love that comes and goes, never leaves....
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Twenty-five years ago, Len and Nancy Tsou made a ten-day trip to Spain tracing some of the battlefields where Chinese brigadistas had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Among other sites, they followed the trail of a Lincoln vet, Wen-Rao Chen of the XVth International Brigade, who lost his life in the battle of...
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In the spring of 1937, a group of English-speaking journalists and filmmakers launched a shortwave radio broadcast from Madrid to tell the world what was happening in Spain firsthand. It found an eager audience all across the United States and Canada.
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Ramon Sender Barayón is a pioneer of US counterculture and the son of Amparo Barayón, who was killed by fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and the novelist Ramón J. Sender. A new documentary by Luis Olano sheds light on his remarkable life.
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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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