Dear Friends, The two main lessons to draw from the last 12 months are not particularly new—but they are crucial nonetheless. First, healthcare is a public good and should be treated as such. And second, the far right is as dangerous as we feared and should be taken very seriously. In relation to the...
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To the Editors: Prof. Helen Graham’s “Why Do So Many Historians Fail to Understand the War in Spain” (December 2020) is a patent attempt to de-politicize the reasons behind and motives for the International Brigades. To use general terms like humanitarian, displacements, migration, ethnicity, and high politics without specifying their context—namely the resistance to...
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Dear Friends, No pasaron. They did not pass. As this issue goes to print, we are emerging from one of the most intense election seasons the United States has ever lived through, following four years that have revealed the best and the worst faces of this country. On the one hand, we saw a...
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To the Editors: Thank you for that amazing story about that amazing photo of an amazing woman: Marina Ginestà, whose life is the stuff of legend. As it happened, I recently visited Spain, where I picked up a magazine with that photo on the cover—but it had no description of who she was. I was...
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As the chaos of this pandemic summer seems to foreshadow an even more eventful fall—please be sure you’re registered to vote!—we’re poised to continue our work with more determination than ever. Teaching history, inspiring activism, and upholding human rights: It’s hard to think of a time in recent memory when ALBA’s motto applied more...
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“Why should one care about events taking place far away?” This is one of the “essential questions” that drive our work with teachers around the country. Together with the question “When do you stand up for what you believe in?” it captures the spirit of the internationalist commitment that drove the almost 40,000 volunteers...
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Dear Friends, We at ALBA would like to express solidarity with all those affected by the COVID crisis. When the brave men and women of the Lincoln Brigade departed on their odyssey for Spain, they were practicing the solidarity that has always been at the heart of our organization. If we wish to endure...
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How can we leverage our educational system into a building block for an anti-fascist front? This has long been the key question behind ALBA’s work.
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It’s late summer, a time when news used to be slow. It no longer is. On the Mediterranean, the fearless life-saving professionals of ProActiva Open Arms, led by the visionary Òscar Camps, are battling narrow-minded, xenophobic European governments for the right to help drowning African migrants safely reach the shores of Italy and Spain....
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To the Editors: I was privileged to attend the ALBA event at the Museum of the City of New York with a friend whose cousin died fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It was a moving experience. ALB volunteers and their stateside supporters were driven by a passion for a better world. They were...
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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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Manus O'Riordan, Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, writes about "The Radical Paul Robeson" and the Spanish Civil War in The Tribune. Read the article here.
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Since 2014, volunteers have visited the graves of Lincolns and honored them on Memorial Day by putting down a simple white rose and an International Brigades flag. This year, ALBA helped advertise this project through a link to the online version of the Volunteer Newsletter1. The response from that approach has been rewarding and...
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Due to the untiring work of Ray Hoff, ALBA’s volunteer data base now has three new photographs. Hoff who identified and contacted family members of Isadore “Jack” Ehrenberg, and Robert Gavin and his younger brother Eugene Victor Gavin who provided the photographs. Family members are encouraged to review the data entries and provide additional...
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Veteran Joe Brandt’s pamphlet Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism. 1936-1939 was published by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades in 1979. It was the first attempt to document the history of African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and...
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African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’’ll Do” by Danny Duncan Collum was published in 1991. In the thirty years since the book was originally published researchers have identified additional African American volunteers and removed others added to the list in error. The updated names are listed below along...
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Volunteer for Liberty V. 1, No. 3, April 1938 Commander Douglas Earl Seacord by Doug Roach Half a world lies between the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts and the Jarama valley. Provincetown, first landing place of the Pilgrims in their search for liberty is – a summer resort frequented by artists, writers and professional people....
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I am searching for information about Morton ‘Vic’ Vicker. I have reason to believe he was in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. I did not meet Vic until November of 1969 in Aguacate, Cuba, on the first Venceremos Brigade.* We bunked together, cut cane together, and spent a lot of time talking. I was...
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A preview of a Q&A with Robin D.G. Kelley that will appear in the December issue of The Volunteer.
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Guardian Newspapers has published two reviews of the new book by Giles Tremlett, ‘The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War’. On Saturday 3 October, The Guardian’s review by Dan Hancox gave the following misleading impression: ‘The brigades drew an astonishing array of international literary figures – Orwell, Hemingway, Spender, Auden’. None of...
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The University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies added part of Dr. Joseph Butwin’s oral history project to its Digital Jewish Studies online collection in 2018. Butwin noted that “initiative” for the project came the “Vets themselves.” The web pages discuss the project’s history and offers individual pages on five veterans: George Watt,...
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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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