Interviews

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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Gonzalo Berger: “Popular Culture Has Flattened the History of the Milicianas.”

November 19, 2022
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Gonzalo Berger: “Popular Culture Has Flattened the History of the <em>Milicianas</em>.”

The Catalan historian Gonzalo Berger, who’s spent years researching the participation of women in the antifascist militias and the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War, has just published a new book, Milicianas, that tells some of these women’s stories for a non-specialized audience.
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Scholars Launch Online Museum of the Spanish Civil War

November 19, 2022
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Scholars Launch Online Museum of the Spanish Civil War

More than 120 objects displayed in five galleries, with each object accompanied by a 350- to 500-word mini-essay available in both English and Spanish: The new Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War is in its first phase but already has a lot to offer to a curious visitor.
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“Starting the IBMT is the best thing we’ve ever done.” Checking in with ALBA’s Younger Sister Across the Pond

August 18, 2022
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“Starting the IBMT is the best thing we’ve ever done.” Checking in with ALBA’s Younger Sister Across the Pond

Around the turn of the millennium, the association of British veterans of the Spanish Civil War merged with the Friends of the International Brigades to form the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT), ALBA’s sister organization in the UK. Like ALBA, the IBMT is dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the antifascist volunteers who...
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