David Lomon, who died on 21 December 2012, aged 94, was the last known survivor in Britain of the more than 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who joined the International Brigades.
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Sylvia H. Thompson, who spent her life fighting for the poor and oppressed and championing the legacy of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died of cancer in December in New York City. A stalwart supporter of both VALB and ALBA, she volunteered countless hours, year after year, organizing VALB’s annual reunions in...
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On the last day of 2012, Dr. Moisès Broggi decided to not celebrate New Year’s Eve for 105th time in his life. Some months earlier we had finished up an article together, L’exili i el silenci (“Exile and Silence”). It would be the last piece of writing of someone whom many of us had...
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Moises Broggi i Vallès, Catalan surgeon who served in the 35th International Division Medical Services, passed away on December 31, 2012. As a young doctor, working in an on call capacity, he provided medical care in the Military Hospital of Barcelona from the first day of the war. In early 1937 he was appointed...
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Harry W. Randall, Jr., once the chief photographer of the special photographic unit of the Fifteenth Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, died at a care facility in Snowflake, Arizona on November 11. His vast collection of photographs—which included not only his own camera work but a large array of negatives, albums of prints,...
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The past months have been a time of loss for the International Brigade community. Harry Randall, Adolphe Low, Jim Benét, David Lomon, and Albert Hirschman left us, as did Sylvia Thompson, widow of Lincoln Brigade and Second World War veteran Bob Thompson (1915-1965) and Dr. Moisès Broggi, the Catalan physician who headed up the...
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Victor Grossman in Berlin writes to report sad news: the death, earlier this month, of German IB veteran Adolphe Low, who was granted French citizenship in 1945 and remained in France. He was the last of the German International Brigade veterans. Adolphe Low was born as Adolf Löw in Cottbus, south of Berlin, in...
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Mike Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and ALBA board member, died unexpectedly on July 24. He was 66. A well known and accomplished archivist and historian, he came to NYU in 2002 from the Hagley Museum and Library, after working at Cornell University and the...
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Earlier this month, journalism mourned the death of the radical British journalist Alexander Cockburn, son of the journalist and Spanish Civil War veteran Claud Cockburn, aka Frank Pitcairn (1904-1981). Among the many obituaries, The Nation's Victor Navasky writes:
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In the wake of the untimely deaths of Alexander Cockburn and Michael Nash, we are sad to report the passing of John "Tito" Gerassi, author, journalist, historian, and son of Spanish Civil War veteran Fernando Gerassi, the last Republican commander of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War.
Gerassi received his MA at Columbia University...
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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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