On the morning of Thursday, November 5, the day before the Merriman plaque unveiling, UC Berkeley will host a three-hour, in-person ALBA teacher workshop titled “The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond.” Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the session will be...
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In our ongoing online film discussion series, dozens of ALBA community members gathered on June 12 for our Pride Month feature, Alejandro Marín’s film Te estoy amando locamente (Love & Revolution, 2023), which tells the story of LGBTQ repression and resistance in southern Spain in the years following Franco’s death. Expertly facilitating the discussion...
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In addition to the November celebrations in Berkeley, ALBA has an event-filled fall planned.
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The much-awaited unveiling of a plaque commemorating ALB Commander Robert Merriman this coming November 6 is accompanied by a slate of educational and other programs.
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On March 23, ALBA celebrated Women’s History Month at the International Center of Photography, in New York, with photographer Espe Pons, the author of Maybe Never Again, a photobook about foreign women who joined the Republican struggle against fascism. Pons was joined by ALBA’s Jo Labanyi, Cynthia Young, and Kathleen Brown, and Helen Oclee-Brown...
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Last year, a group of Yale undergraduates got the chance to immerse themselves in two kinds of archives: the university’s unique Spanish Civil War collection and the streets of Barcelona.
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ALBA's film discussion series continues with a Pride Month feature and Jaime Camino's "Spain Again," with Alvah Bessie.
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The first in a series of online roundtable gatherings about the challenges and opportunities of teaching antifascist history today took place on April 16, focusing on the situation in American higher education. For 90 minutes, Kirsten Weld (Harvard), Bill Mullen (Purdue), and Deborah Cohn (Indiana Bloomington) discussed questions raised by ALBA’s moderator, Sebastiaan Faber,...
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At a moving and inspirational ceremony on May 2 in New York City, two ALBA/Puffin Awards for Human Rights Activism were awarded to Bay Resistance and Unión del Barrio, two California-based organizations.
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What is it like for Spanish high school students to learn about the International Brigades today? History teacher Ioseba Landa reports from the trenches.
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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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After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
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Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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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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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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