This past July, the Catalan government exhumed three mass graves from the Civil War that may include remains of International Brigade members who died in battle.
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The half-tracks of the French Second Armored Division that entered Paris in August 1944 were baptized “Brunete,” “Guadalajara,” “Teruel,” or “L’Ebre,” and manned by Spanish exiles. Some 500 Spanish Loyalists served in the Leclerc Division. Yet the official story of the Liberation of Paris has always presented the battle as a purely French affair.
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This summer, Eric Levenson and his family visited Spain to pass along his father’s memory to the next generations, following on an earlier visit to the country in 2002. Eric’s father, Leonard Levenson (1913-2005), arrived in Spain in June 1937. He fought with the Lincoln Battalion as well as with the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion,...
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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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ALBA Institutes for Middle & High School Teachers (Social Studies, Spanish & English) Fall Agenda Oct 11 Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH (partners: NEOEA, Oberlin College) Oct 19 Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL (partner: Elmhurst College) Nov 5 King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, New York City (partner: NYU) Nov 6 Bergen, New Jersey (partner:...
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Are you a middle or high school teacher? Do you know one? Spread the word about ALBA’s teaching institutes. This fall offers plenty of opportunities to join!
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Giles Tremlett, long-time correspondent in Madrid, is finishing a major new book on the 35,000 volunteers from all over the world who flocked to Spain to help defend the Second Spanish Republic against fascism.
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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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Over the last few years, several announcements have mourned the passing of the last British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. First there was David Lomon, then Philip Tammer, and then recently Stan Hilton, all of whom were hailed as “the last of the last.” In fact, none of them were. As a November 2017 article by Carmelo...
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On April 13, 2019 in the Catalonian village of Els Guiamets in the famed Priorat wine region, the anti-fascist activist and Nazi camp survivor Neus Català died in an assisted living facility only a few hundred yards from the house where she had been born 103 years earlier. Català is one of the last...
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Sanctuary   The village creek serpentines to open seas where I stand all day at the ocean shore, feeling the Earth’s core tremble.   Sailor Melville got it right, picturing landlubbers lined at water’s edge looking outward on holidays chary of wet feet.   I’m of the coastal breed, fear-fed by tsunamis, yellow signs...
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Darryl Anthony Burrowes, Historians at War: Cold War Influences on Anglo–American Representations of the Spanish Civil War. Brighton, Great Britain: Sussex Academic Press, 2019.
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The ALBA collection at NYU’s Tamiment Library is an extraordinary trove of documents, images, and artifacts chronicling the lives of the almost 3,000 American men and women who joined the Spanish Civil War. It collection represents about ten percent of these volunteers—a respectable sampling. But is it representative?
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What prompted the migrant caravan? A first-hand look at two epicenters of the immigration story.
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The notion that the Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939 is a convention that is as taken for granted—in textbooks, scholarship and the media—as, say, the date of Franco’s death, November 20, 1975. Yet the death of Franco is a fact, while the establishment of the end of the war in 1939...
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Alvah Bessie’s 1939 memoir still reads like a compelling lesson in twentieth-century history—as does the rest of Bessie’s activist life.
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Among the 35,000 volunteers who traveled to Spain to support the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War were two Iraqis. This is what we know about them.
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We are thrilled to announce that ALBA has hired a new executive director. Mark Wallem is an accomplished human rights lawyer who comes to ALBA with more than 20 years of experience in international non-profit management and fundraising. Born and raised in Minnesota, Mark holds a BA in Political Science and JD. He has...
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Dear Friends, More than 50 New York City high school students, together with their history teachers, attended our annual event on May 5. It’s been a while since we had so many young faces in the audience. Along with some 150 other attendees, they saw the Immigration Justice Campaign receive the ALBA/Puffin Award for...
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Thank you very much to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Puffin Foundation. I wanted to share the story of one father and daughter whom federal enforcement agents separated from each other at the border during the crisis this past summer. A father I will call “Hector” and his daughter fled their indigenous...
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Among the audience this year were more than 50 New York City high school students whose teachers are alumni of ALBA’s professional-development workshops. On May 5, two days after what would have been Pete Seeger’s one hundredth birthday, more than 200 people gathered in the same auditorium of the Museum of the City of...
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As you make your plans, please consider including ALBA in your will or living trust, or naming us as a beneficiary of your state.
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A few years ago, my wife and I visited Vienna and made a side trip by train to Mauthausen.
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Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on France24 and is reprinted here with the author’s permission. Nearly half a million Spaniards crossed the border into France after Barcelona fell to General Francisco Franco 80 years ago. Many were detained in makeshift internment camps during a dark chapter of French history that has been all but forgotten....
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Javier Cercas, The Impostor. Translation Frank Wynne. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. 384 pp.
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Sebastiaan Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018. 241 pp.
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New Yorker Arthur Witt was among the many Lincoln volunteers to be killed at Jarama, in February 1937. Although he was only 29, he’d lived a full life. The back story of a Lincoln Volunteer. Arthur Witt (originally Witkowsky) was born on October 4, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York in a modest Jewish family....
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From the moment he assumed office, President Trump has advanced the most xenophobic immigration policy since the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), negatively affecting all immigrants regardless of status, including naturalized citizens.
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An old snapshot of three smiling teenagers leads a researcher to one of the Spanish survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
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Dean Burrier Sanchis is a Spanish teacher and soccer coach in Elk Grove, Illinois. He also has a deep personal connection to the Spanish Civil War. Dean has spent several years uncovering and documenting the life story of his grandfather and Lincoln veteran Vicente Sanchis Amades.
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What does it mean for undergraduates to do the work of narrating memory? Two faculty and one librarian worked with undergraduate students in the Hunter College Archives and the ALBA Collection at the Tamiment Library. The experience was transformative for all.
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High school history teachers who struggle to find room in their curriculum to teach the Spanish Civil War. One way to create space is to introduce the topic as part of broader thematic units—for example, on twentieth-century art and politics. Why did some artists of the avant-garde end up on Franco’s side, while others...
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Dear Friends and Comrades: One foot in the past and one foot in the present, with our eyes set on the future: that’s ALBA’s signature straddle. As our tagline says, we teach history to inspire activism and uphold human rights. Inspired by the anti-fascist activism of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, ALBA taps into America’s...
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In 2018, ALBA held a record number of eleven institutes and workshops for high school teachers throughout the country, reaching more than 270 teachers and thousands of students.
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On May 5, ALBA and the Puffin Foundation will join in honoring and supporting the Immigration Justice Campaign (IJC) with the 2019 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism in a ceremony to be held at the Museum of the City of New York (tickets | press release).
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