In September, the ALBA office received a note from Judith Adler, a retired professor of sociology at Memorial University in Canada.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
In September, the ALBA office received a note from Judith Adler, a retired professor of sociology at Memorial University in Canada.
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Dear Friends, Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. For the first time in the 16-year history of the ALBA/Puffin Award, two recipients received the full prize: Bay Resistance and Unión del Barrio, two California-based organizations that have spent many years developing networks, tactics, and strategies to protect vulnerable populations against state and corporate abuse....
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I am dedicating my contribution to ALBA to a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who was born and raised in Galicia, Spain.
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Ninety years is a particularly significant interval of time, as it matches, more or less, the limits of a human being’s lifespan.
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Dear Friends, Since the never-ending news cycle has us all gasping for air, it’s hard to recall what life was like last week—let alone last year. Still, it will be a while before we forget this past November 4. For one, it’s not every day that a politician opens a victory speech quoting Eugene...
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To the Editors: An article by Kathryn Everly in the March 2022 Volunteer on Salaria Kea’s life and her experiences in Spain focused on the fairness of comments found in the ALBA Collection at the Tamiment Library. When Fredericka Martin reviewed materials by and about Salaria, she found that some accounts of incidents were...
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To the Editors: As a longtime supporter of VALB and ALBA—and as a 76-year-old “red diaper baby” having been brought up in a “Brigade-adjacent” family—I was excited to see the announcement for the play At the Barricades, brought to us by a younger generation of activist theater makers. The performance was so impressive that I...
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Dear Friends, “There will be Brigades forming again,” John Garfield’s character says at the end of The Fallen Sparrow, the 1943 spy thriller in which he plays Kit McKittrick, a traumatized Lincoln vet who singlehandedly foils a Nazi plot. Although the phrase is easy to miss, it is key to understanding the story’s political...
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I'm hoping the Volunteer's readers can help me with a research project.
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Eddie Barsky was a close friend of my father, Dr. Benjamin Segal, an OB-GYN who delivered many of the “red diaper babies” in New York City and worked with Dr. Barsky on various medical and political projects.
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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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