On Monday March 2, 2020, we will request passport files for the last set of 26 volunteers in Phase One of the Freedom of Information Act Project. The project started in May 2018 with a request to Office of Legal Affairs and Law Enforcement Liaison, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Passport Services, United States Department...
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Volunteer John Augustus Ramatowski was only 21-years old when he went missing in action during The Retreats in April 1938. Six of the numerous letters he wrote home were saved and passed down through the family. His letters were addressed to his older brother Adam and his family disclose his observations about France, Spain,...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, January 13, 1938 (This pledge was taken by the 15th Brigade Training Camp soldiers on January 1, 1938.) We promise, on this New Year’s day, to renew our Pledge: With all our hearts, we shall fight until we win our Victory over fascism. We shall carry out our duties in...
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Most American volunteers demonstrated a high level of commitment during their voyage to Spain. While only a few turned back voluntarily, some were sent back. Of those who were sent back, medical conditions were the most common reason, though some were sent back for political reasons. Only three are known to have turned...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, Vo. II, No. 2, January 13, 1938 The month of January is an especially significant month for Americans in Spain. It was on January 2, 1937 – a year ago – that the first large group of American volunteers set foot on Spanish soil. Reaching Albacete four days later they...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, v. 2, no. 2, January 13, 1938 In case any of the folks at home paused in the middle of their Christmas dinners to have a few sober thoughts about the boys in Spain, they will be glad to know that the boys had a vey good time. The Brigade...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V. 2, Special 15, April 9, 1938, p. 2. When I asked Capt. Diaz to give me his life story, he smiled and said it was unimportant. This time Capt. Diaz was wrong. The lives of all anti-fascists are important in these decisive days, especially those who have proved themselves...
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Pursuit of Reason, Philadelphia: Adelante Press, 1971, pp. 21-31 The early morning weather was fine, just fine; warm and sunny, with a very slight breeze from the South. I could smell Africa, over six hundred kilometers away and four thousand feet below me. The month was April. Blue swallows flitted greetings to Spring. I...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, Vol. 2, No. 20, May 25, 1938, p. 3. “Halto!” “Manos arriba!” “Que Brigada?” We of the Transmisiones are becoming expert in replying to these gambits. At Belchite, Lecera, Albalate and Caspe we learnt our lesson, and the fruits were shown in this latest march from Batea. Out of 78...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, Vol. 2, Special 15, April 9, 1938, p. 3. Attached to the British Battalion when we went into action at Fuentes de Ebro last October were two American comrades, Sam Kaplan and another (whose name I never knew), whose great courage in volunteering to get me to safety when I...
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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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All families have secrets, and I discovered mine at a young age, in a box or paper bag, I don’t remember which, in the closet. I knew even then it was a secret, an important secret because no one in my family wanted to talk about my prescient treasure: letters and photographs. I was...
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Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, James D. Fernández had agreed to visit Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid with a group of students from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. The trip was canceled, and instead, he delivered a zoom lecture to the students about Guernica without Guernica, which we...
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Bob Ford, who worked in Hollywood and fought in Spain and World War II, suffered relentless surveillance because of his radical past, as did his wife, Augusta Ain. In 1950 they moved to New Zealand—and never looked back. 4 February 1938 We just returned from Madrid. We had rather a good time except the...
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In 1999, Catherine Wigginton Greene won ALBA’s Watt Award with an essay on Salaria Kea, the only African American nurse to serve in the Spanish Civil War. Twenty-four years later, Wigginton is a successful novelist, filmmaker, and educational consultant whose work still focuses on the themes that drew her to Kea as an undergraduate...
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Sarah Watling is an award-winning author who recently published Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, in which she weaves together the stories of women whose lives were affected by the Spanish Civil War, including Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf, Salaria Kea, and Gerda Taro. Your first...
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The Right’s culture war on schools, universities, and history teachers—thinly disguised as a crusade against straw men like “divisive concepts” and “critical race theory”—is showing no sign of letting up. According to a tracking project at the UCLA Law School, between September 2020 and July 2023, “a total of 214 local, state, and federal...
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Has fascism arrived in the United States? Will it soon? Or has it been living among us for many years? These are the questions that drive the twelve essays gathered in Fascism in America: Past and Present, a new collection edited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, two prominent historians of the Holocaust.
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Stuart Christie, who died in August 2020, was best known as the 18-year-old Scottish anarchist who, in the summer 1964, was part of an attempt to assassinate General Francisco Franco. It was only the beginning of a long life dedicated to left-wing activism.
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The day after Franco’s troops entered Barcelona, Otília Castellví, a young seamstress, woke up to a city she could barely recognize.
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Lincoln veteran Hugo Heurich (1908-1982) was born in Germany and had emigrated to the US in 1929. He arrived in Spain in March 1937 and returned to the US in December 1938. In November 2020, his great-nephew, Armin Heurich, contacted ALBA in November 2020 looking for additional information to include in his great uncle’s oral history, These...
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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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