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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When, in early 2016, we mourned the passing of Delmer Berg, the sole surviving US volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, we had no idea that another US volunteer was still living in southern France. Dean Burrier uncovers his remarkable life story.
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The 80th anniversary of the “Despedida” of 1938 was the occasion to remember the International Brigades in both Paris and Barcelona with two different international conferences. Both initiatives brought together an impressive list of scholars who presented cutting-edge research on a wide range of subjects.
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The latest addition to the Nigel Townson’s Sussex Studies in Spanish History, Spain 1936: Year Zero compiles fourteen transnational views of Spanish history into one volume.
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History Lessons: A Memoir of Growing Up in an American Communist Family, by Dan Lynn Watt. Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2017, 351 pp.
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In Digging the Spanish Earth, a veteran filmmaker pays tribute to Joris Ivens’s classic—while also revealing the curious circumstances under which Ivens made his film.
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Few people know that the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen was built by Spanish Republicans who were also its first inmates.
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The last couple of years have seen a number of wonderful new graphic novels on the Spanish Civil War.
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An archival donation reveals new details about Griff Maclaurin, a charismatic New Zealander who left Cambridge, England, to serve as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, where he fought alongside the poet John Cornford and died in the battle for Madrid.
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This year’s George Watt Essay contest for the best student writing on the Spanish Civil War is receiving well-deserved attention from around the world as a record number of students submitted their essays and poetry, nearly doubling the previous number of submissions last year.
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For those of us who think a lot about the 1930s, it’s hard to follow current events and not be reminded of the time when fascism began its rapid expansion.
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The Ohio high-school teachers who joined ALBA's workshop in Beachwood, Ohio, this past October 12, left inspired—and wanting more.
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ALBA’s seventh annual human rights documentary film festival, Impugning Impunity, drew over 130 submissions from 41 countries.
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Thank you, Alan Singer, for your article in The Volunteer (June 2018). Considering the lessons offered by history is the reason ALBA exists, and your article was important and relevant.
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What you leave to friends and loved ones—and the causes you champion—are ways of expressing your hopes and dreams for the future and perpetuate your part in the story of the Lincoln Brigade. As you make your plans, please consider including ALBA in your will or living trust, or naming us as a...
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This past July, Barbez and Velina Brown filled the ruins of the Santo Domingo church in Pontevedra, Spain with anti-fascist music in a rendition of For Those Who Came After, their new album of Spanish Civil War songs. The album is available at info@alba-valb.org. $20 for domestic orders (incl. sh&h). Barbez generously donates all proceeds...
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Nancy Macdonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, Insight Books, 1987.
Scott Soo, The routes to exile: France and the Spanish Civil War refugees, 1939-2009, Manchester University Press, 2013.
Gerben Zaagsma, Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War, Bloomsbury: London 2017; 250pp.
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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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The Spanija series translates select 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 Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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Please find attached photos of my visits to the graves of Lester Rowlson and Tersil Obriot last weekend. I left a brigade flag and a fresh white rose at each. ,,, I was also proud to include aspects of my Clapton CFC scarf; you might have heard of this small football club in London that...
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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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