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.

Ronald V. Dellums, a tireless advocate for peace, justice, and equality, served his Oakland, California district for 27 years in the House of Representatives. A vigorous supporter of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, he carried on their example when he stated, at the beginning of his career in Congress, that he was committed...
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The following text is based on Paul Preston’s introduction to the Spanish re-edition of Ramón Sender-Barayón’s A Death in Zamora (Postmetrópolis, 2018), in which the son of Ramón J. Sender and Amparo Barayón investigates the circumstances of his mother’s death three months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
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The distinction between “illegitimate” migrants fleeing poverty and “legitimate” refugees escaping political persecution originated during the Cold War to bolster the anti-communist aggression of U.S. and Western governments. Today, it’s used to justify some of the greatest atrocities of our times.
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The British historian Paul Preston, who just turned 72, has been knighted—a good moment to look back on his career and assess the latest developments in Spain, where one of his major research subjects, Franco, continues to stir up controversy. “In Spain, there’s a kind of historic notion that the British are polite, gentlemanly,...
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Like many returning U.S. veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Delmer Berg was targeted for surveillance by the FBI. His file, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, tells us less about Berg than about Hoover’s agency.
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This fall, ALBA's teaching team is back on the road.
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Arts Commission approves repair to the San Francisco national monument that will stand the test of time.
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We are going to press on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Ebro, the longest, most extensive, and bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War. In spite of Franco’s superiority in manpower and equipment, the Republicans sought to thwart the Fascist offensive on Valencia and to gain time in the hope that...
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From September 21 through 23, “Impugning Impunity” presents 15 short and long documentaries from around the world. Info at www.iiff-docs.com
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Spain’s new Prime Minister, the Socialist Pedro Sánchez, has decided it’s time to remove Franco’s body and redefine his mausoleum, the Valley of the Fallen. Few people know more about the Valley and its possible future than the anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz. An interview.
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In recent years, investigators of the research group DIDPATRI (Didactics of Heritage) at the University of Barcelona have tried to locate the remains of Robert Hale Merriman, Commander of the Lincoln-Washington Battalion and Chief of Staff of the XV International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
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Letter by eight-year-old Luca Kaufman at Kolot Chayeinu (Voices of Our Lives, Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY), written as part of a school project on Heroes of Jewish Resistance.
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Herman Schmidt of Charlotte Court House, Virginia, talks about how he learned about ALBA and how the lessons of the Lincoln Brigade have informed his politics. He is pictured here with his Triumph motorcycle. Herman rides, camps and hikes across Virginia and as far away as Utah.
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Katherine O. Stafford, Narrating War in Peace: The Spanish Civil War in the Transition and Today. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 197 pp.

Eunice Lipton, A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance, and a Family’s Secrets. University of New Mexico Press 2016, 176pp.

Doug Jolly, a New Zealand-born surgeon who served with the Spanish Republican Army’s medical services during the civil war has been posthumously honored in his home town.
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Since the inauguration of Donald Trump as President, a number of action-based movements in the United States have emerged Can these largely single-issue movements coalesce into a more unified progressive and democratic movement? There are important lessons from the past that can help progressives today build a successful movement for social change.
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Among the dozens of primary source documents in the resource binder distributed to the teachers who participate in ALBA’s teaching institutes are a letter that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to the U.S. ambassador in Madrid in March 1945, and the transcript of a conversation four years later between Milt Wolff, the last commander...
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