In the autumn of 1937, after the Republican front had collapsed in Asturias and with any possibility of retreat being prevented by the sea, hundreds of fugitives took refuge on the steep, leafy slopes of the Cantabrian Mountains, their only objective being to escape the repression inflicted by the winning side and to wait...
Read more »

Julio Llamazares was born in 1955 in Vegamián, a small town in the province of León, in the north of Spain, where his father worked as a teacher. In 1968, Vegamián disappeared from the map. Along with five other towns, it was submerged in a huge artificial lake. The Francoist state, allied with the...
Read more »

The plight of the non-citizen veterans of US military service who have been deported stands as a small but telling example of how our country falls far short of living up to its promises.
Read more »

Last August, in the wake of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Ohio Humanities issued a powerful letter condemning white supremacists who attacked antifascist protestors. We speak with Executive Director Pat Williamsen about the need for public humanists to take a stand. “America has forgotten itself.”
Read more »

The escalating conflict between Spain and Catalonia led to the country’s deepest constitutional crisis since the transition to democracy. Journalist Emilio Silva reflects on the short- and long-term impact. “For someone on the left, the confusion in terms of priorities and alliances is hard to understand.”
Read more »

Dayana Arrue is a Geoscience Engineering major at Rutgers University and an intern at an engineering firm. An activist for environmental and migration-related causes, she hopes to remediate groundwater pollution by designing wastewater treatment systems. She is also a passionate speaker on behalf of the Dreamers, the undocumented young activists who received the ALBA/Puffin...
Read more »

The 2017 George Watt Essay Prize for the best writing on the Spanish Civil War received a record number of submissions. Students from Canada, Egypt, and 18 U.S. states submitted essays, poems, and stories for this year’s annual prizes.
Read more »

We have all been following the conflict over the status of Catalonia within the Spanish state. This issue of The Volunteer features an insightful interview on the topic with journalist Emilio Silva. The conflict over Catalonia has not only mobilized a sector of the left but also, Silva notes, “improved the image of the...
Read more »

ALBA’s Human Rights Film Festival shines a light on human rights abuses—and on those who try to stop them—wherever they may happen. The geography covered by this year’s Impugning Impunity is vast.
Read more »

For the past ten years, ALBA has been conducting professional development workshops for high school educators all over the country, and to date we have reached over 1,200 teachers in more than nine states.
Read more »

The fate of the POUM, among the most controversial episodes of the Spanish Civil War, is shrouded in taboo. Founded by Andreu Nin and Joaquín Maurín, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) fought alongside the Republic, defending the workers’ revolution as the road to society’s emancipation. After the so-called...
Read more »

Alejandra Soler Gilabert, who died in Valencia, Spain last March, was one of the Spanish teachers who worked with the nearly 3,000 children who were evacuated to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War. Soler is credited with saving the lives of 14 children during the battle at Stalingrad—the turning point of the...
Read more »

There are many ways to help support the work ALBA does throughout the country, from planned gifts to monthly donations.
Read more »

A great way to get to know the ALBA collection! Includes an instructional program for those who are interested in learning how to conduct research in the archive.
Read more »

  ALBA presents three days of groundbreaking human rights documentaries! IIFFDOCS NY September 22-24, 2017 @DCTV 87 Lafayette Street, NY From workers in late capitalism to testimonies of resistance worldwide, Impugning Impunity brings social and political struggles to the forefront through the art of nonfction storytelling For more information visit: www.iiff-docs.com
Read more »

No Pasarán: Writings from the Spanish Civil War. Edited by Pete Ayrton. London/New York: Pegasus Books, 2016. 393pp.

Gabriel Peri and Lucien Sampaix, two veteran writers of the Parisian pre-war Communist newspaper Humanité, were among the 100 hostages shot in late 1941 at Mont Valerien Fortress just north of Paris as one of the three “punishments” inflicted on the Parisian population by General Otto von Stuelpnagel in reprisal for the repeated bombings....
Read more »

Europe is seeing a resurgence of hatred and intolerance. While the direct heirs to the Fascist and Nazi legacies have changed their rhetoric, extreme right-wing organizations formed mainly by young people are gaining ground. But they no longer make overt racist or supremacist claims. Instead, they call themselves identitaires.
Read more »

Among the almost 3,000 foreign anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, more than one hundred came from the United States. Their story has been almost entirely overlooked.
Read more »

The tens of thousands of volunteers who joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War included a relatively high percentage of men and women of Jewish descent. But can we say that these volunteers were driven by a specifically Jewish motivation to fight fascism in Spain? Or did their presence simply reflect the...
Read more »

Ben Barsky had volunteered for Spain in 1937 and never returned. Why and how did he go? Why did the family never receive any notice of his death? And—perhaps most importantly and painfully—why has Ben’s life and sacrifice been such a taboo subject in the family for so many years? Daniel Czitrom explores the...
Read more »

We know where and when the ALB vets were born, their political affiliations, which battles they fought in, and when they died. For too many Abraham Lincoln Brigade vets, this is all the information we have. In Samuel Waitzman’s case, that all changed with an email.
Read more »

George Snook is an award-winning history teacher at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For over 25 years he has inspired his students to engage history by doing their own research. The Spanish Civil War and the experiences of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade play a central role in his classes. An alum...
Read more »

Almost 80 years after her father Timoteo’s violent death during the Franco dictatorship, Ascensión Mendieta has finally been able to re-bury his remains. In her 90s now, Mendieta last saw Timoteo when she was 13. A labor leader in the tiny village of Sacedón, east of Madrid, he was picked up from the family...
Read more »

“America & World Fascism,” ALBA Teaching Institutes program, launches a statewide series at the Ohio Council for the Social Studies (OCSS) Meeting in September, with professional development workshops following month for teachers in Cleveland and Bowling Green. Besides exploring U.S. and World History topics from the Spanish Civil War and World War II, this...
Read more »

Almost eighty years after he disappeared, Ascención Mendieta could finally give a proper burial to her father, murdered by the Franco regime.
Read more »

Photography is a powerful teaching tool. Last April, a group of American students and I met Ricard Martínez in front of a pharmacy on Barcelona’s Carrer de Diputació to follow the steps that Agustí Centelles, one of the most important photographers of the Spanish Civil War, had taken on July 19, 1936, the first...
Read more »

Read more »

Julius Ruiz. Paracuellos: The Elimination of the ‘Fifth Column’ in Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War Brighton, UK; Chicago; Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2017.

After the 1936 outbreak of the war in Spain, students at the University of Michigan rallied in support of the Republic. A symposium on March 23-25 featuring Peter Carroll and Robert Cohen commemorated this history of political commitment.
Read more »

Do refugees have rights? If so, who is responsible to protect them? These contemporary questions are not new. Indeed, they were raised eloquently by the American journalist Jay Allen in November 1939 in Survey Graphic, a monthly magazine edited by Paul Kellogg, illustrated with images by Ione Robinson (1910-1989), an American photographer and artist....
Read more »

In April 1937, Ernest Hemingway filed a series of dispatches from Madrid on the atrocious Nationalist bombing campaigns. Curiously, he failed to mention the attack on Guernica.  The legion of international observers – journalists, photographers, writers and “celebrities” of all kinds – passing through Spain during the Spanish Civil War undoubtedly shaped how that...
Read more »

Karen Pleasant, History Department Chair at Stoneleigh Burnham School in Greenfield, Massachusetts, participated in ALBA’s two-day institute this spring. A 17-year veteran in the classroom, she teaches U.S. History and several history classes in the International Baccalaureate curriculum.
Read more »

Reflecting a growing interest among Americans about the history of fascism and anti-fascism, and resulting struggles for the rights of citizens and civilians in wartime, ALBA launched a three-day symposium for high school teachers of New York City to explore these themes using primary sources that remain accessible and challenging for their students.
Read more »

ALBA has expanded the scope of its teaching institutes, moving from the Spanish Civil War to a broader and more ambitious focus on the role of the United States in the world, as well as the moral, political, and judicial aspects of the struggle for human rights. The time is right: “Fascism” was among...
Read more »