Ascensión Mendieta, whose father Timoteo, a labor activist from Guadalajara, was killed by the Franco regime shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War, in November 1939, passed away on September 16. She was 93 years old. In the last years of her life, Ms. Mendieta became a symbol of the quest for...
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In 1948, three young activists rescued two Spanish students from the Francoist labor camp at Cuelgamuros, outside of Madrid, where prisoners of war were building the monument that would later become known as the Valley of the Fallen. They were Paco Benet, the brother of the Spanish novelist Juan Benet; Barbara Mailer, the sister...
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Gabe Jackson, who served for many years on ALBA’s Board and Honorary Board of Governors, passed away this November 3, at the age of 98.
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One of ALBA co-chairs was interviewed on National Public Radio’s Here and Now to talk about the exhumation, on October 24, of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen.
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In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, the German writer Ernst Toller organized a multi-million-dollar international campaign to alleviate the hunger and misery of Spain’s civilian population. Although Toller’s herculean effort garnered broad support, it has been largely forgotten.
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Just Mercy, the bestselling memoir by ALBA/Puffin Award winner Bryan Stevenson, has inspired a film featuring Michael B. Jordan (who plays Stevenson), Jamie Foxx, Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall, and Brie Larson. It tells the true story of Walter McMillian, an Alabama man on death row who appeals his murder conviction with...
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Robert Hale Merriman, the commander of the Lincoln Battalion who mysteriously disappeared during the Battle of Teruel in early April 1938, has been drawing attention. Milton Zerman, a history major at UC Berkeley, has been raising $1,000 to place a plaque commemorating Merriman and his wife, Marion, outside the Virginia Street apartment building where...
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A seasoned New York City reporter’s search for her family history leads her back to Civil War Spain.
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Why was the United States so reluctant to support the Spanish Republic? What prompted Roosevelt’s reactionary attitude to the struggle of Spanish democracy against fascism? Isolationism and FDR’s fear of losing the Catholic vote played a role—but they are not the whole story. President Franklin D. Roosevelt has long been an iconic figure for...
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Students from around the world once again applied to ALBA’s Watt Essay contest, which recognizes academic projects and essays about the Spanish Civil War. This year, five prizes were awarded.
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Spanish high schools often cover the Civil War and Francoism only sporadically and superficially. A new book with lesson plans based on graphic novels hopes to improve the situation. Was Francisco Franco a dictator? The question seems silly. Yet in the days following Franco’s exhumation from the Valley of the Fallen this fall, a...
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This past October and November, ALBA staff have worked with high school teachers in Ohio, New York, and New Jersey, offering full-day workshops on “The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond.” In November, ALBA also offered two workshops for educators at the Conference on...
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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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Emilio Silva, the founder of the ALBA/Puffin Award-winning Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), was back in New York City in October as part of a North-American tour. His New York visit included a screening of Bones of Contention, a documentary by Andrea Weiss about Spanish efforts to locate and exhume victims...
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After more than a year of work, the restoration of the largest United States monument dedicated to the volunteers who fought fascism in Spain, at the end of San Francisco’s Market Street, across the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building, is nearing completion. Designed by Walter Hood and Ann Chamberlain, the monument consists of 44...
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What role did fascism play in defining the Franco regime? The Last Survivor offers a fresh interpretation of the dictatorship as ideologically fascist at its core, rather than understanding it through a purely symbolic or discursive understanding of fascism as a movement of values and attitudes. Levering new research into state structures, the editors...
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Revisiting a historic image to take a new photograph from the same point of view—the technique known as re-photography—opens up new avenues for research. It also helps redefine our relationship to the past and the future. What does rephotography look like in relation to the Spanish Civil War and Francoism? A conversation with Ricard...
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With the viral specter of right-wing nationalism, militarism, fascism, and xenophobia on the rise once again, the lessons from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives are timely and critical. For Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha and her family, they are also personal and foundational.
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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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