Interviews

“For Whom the Bell Tolls Is a Very Strange Book”—Alex Vernon, Hemingway Scholar

February 18, 2024
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“For Whom the Bell Tolls Is a Very Strange Book”—Alex Vernon, Hemingway Scholar

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling Spanish Civil War novel first published in October 1940, is still among his most widely read books. It is also widely misunderstood, says Hemingway scholar Alex Vernon. Vernon teaches at Hendrix College (Arkansas), is the author of Hemingway’s Second War and two army memoirs, and has...
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Karen Nussbaum: “Good Organizing Means That You Don’t Tell People They’re Wrong.”

November 18, 2023
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Karen Nussbaum: “Good Organizing Means That You Don’t Tell People They’re Wrong.”

Earlier this year, we received an unexpected email from Karen Nussbaum, the legendary labor activist, asking to be put on the mailing list for the Volunteer. She explained that she’d read the magazine during a visit to her father, the actor Mike Nussbaum, a longtime ALBA supporter. One thing led to the other, and...
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UC Berkeley Approves Monument to Merriman and the Lincoln Brigade

November 15, 2023
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UC Berkeley Approves Monument to Merriman and the Lincoln Brigade

Since April 2018, the Catalan town Corbera d’Ebre has featured a bronze plaque in memory of Robert Hale Merriman, commander of the Lincoln Battalion, who went missing in action nearby in April 1938. A copy of the plaque will be featured in a new monument on the UC Berkeley campus.
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Watt Winner Catherine Wigginton: “I’ve Never Stopped Thinking about Salaria Kea.”

August 30, 2023
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Watt Winner Catherine Wigginton: “I’ve Never Stopped Thinking about Salaria Kea.”

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, author of Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: “Orwell and Hemingway Are Not the Whole Story.”

August 30, 2023
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Sarah Watling, author of <em>Tomorrow Perhaps the Future</em>: “Orwell and Hemingway Are Not the Whole Story.”

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 Effort to Use State Power to Restrict What Teachers Can Say and Do in the Classroom Is Unprecedented.”

August 21, 2023
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“The Effort to Use State Power to Restrict What Teachers Can Say and Do in the Classroom Is Unprecedented.”

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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“We Can No Longer Teach Fascism as Something Safely Tucked Away in the Past.”

August 19, 2023
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“We Can No Longer Teach Fascism as Something Safely Tucked Away in the Past.”

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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Faces of ALBA: “Students Are Drawn to Antifascism”–Michael Koncewicz

May 17, 2023
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<em>Faces of ALBA:</em> “Students Are Drawn to Antifascism”–Michael Koncewicz

For close to ten years, the historian Michael Koncewicz, the Michael Nash Research Scholar at Tamiment Library, worked with the ALBA collection on a daily basis. In April, he left the library to become Associate Director at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The author of They Said No To Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up...
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Faces of ALBA—Daniel Millstone: “My Parents Didn’t Tone Anything Down.”

February 17, 2023
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<em>Faces of ALBA</em>—Daniel Millstone: “My Parents Didn’t Tone Anything Down.”

Daniel Millstone, a retired attorney in New York City, is the son of George Millstone (1901-1967), a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and Dorothy Loeb (1907-1977), who during the Spanish Civil War worked in France and Spain for the Committee for Spanish Children. A lifelong activist himself, Millstone worked for Students for a...
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Liberating Palestine in Spain: Novel on Palestinian Arab Volunteers in the IB

February 17, 2023
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Liberating Palestine in Spain: Novel on Palestinian Arab Volunteers in the IB

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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