Twenty medical doctors serving in the International Brigades went straight from Spain to China to help the country defend itself against Japanese aggression. They are remembered fondly in China today.
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Some soldiers instinctively respond to concepts in international law of which they may not even be aware. When men and women in the military do or see things that offend their deeply held sense of right and wrong, they may experience moral injury, a condition that overlaps with but is not the same as...
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Max Aub (1903-1972) was born in Paris to a German-Jewish family that moved to Spain when he was 11. During the Spanish Civil War, he worked for the Republican government. After Franco’s victory he was arrested in France and spent three years in concentration camps, after which he fled to Mexico. He spent his...
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All my life I've known about Spain. I grew up singing Freiheit and Viva la Quince Brigada and Los Cuatro Generales, and knew the names of some of the places in Spain where the big battles were fought. I owe a lot to my parents, and to the culture they helped create. They didn't...
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British and Spanish archaeologists have spent two years investigating Spanish battle sites. American journalist Steve Dinnen joined the dig at Belchite. “We are not here to tell nice stories about the past. The past hurts.”
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An unpublished poem by Víctor Jiménez Jódar, with translation by ALBA's Antony Geist.
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What a surprise, a few minutes ago, to open the June issue of The Volunteer and to see on page 14 the article about my father, Pierre Daura, with reproductions of two of his paintings.
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Mari Pepa Colomer y Dolors Vives fueron las primeras dos mujeres de la España republicana en conseguir su título de piloto y ambas trabajaron como instructoras para el Ejército de la República durante la Guerra Civil. Vivieron vidas de leyenda, pero una década después de su fallecimiento, la mayoría de los españoles no las conocen. (Version in...
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Mari Pepa Colomer and Dolors Vives were the first two women in the Spanish Republic to earn their pilot’s license, working as flight instructors for the Republican Army. Both led lives of legend and enjoyed an uncommon longevity—yet a decade after their deaths, most Spaniards have never heard of them.
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(English translation.) El tiempo y la justicia son inseparables: es imposible hacer justicia sin tener una conciencia del tiempo. El tiempo no sólo pasa para los muertos; también pasa para los vivos–los vivos que están esperando, al borde de la fosa, para el retorno de los restos de sus seres queridos. Están esperando a...
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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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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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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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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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