A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father, by David Maraniss. New York, Simon and Schuster, 2019.
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Memorial Day is the day traditionally set aside to remember Americans who served in the military.  And yet Americans who went to Spain to fight fascism are rarely if ever included in the remembrances on this day. We would like to change this. Over the last two years, Canadian volunteers led by Pamela Vivian,...
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Twenty-five years ago, Len and Nancy Tsou made a ten-day trip to Spain tracing some of the battlefields where Chinese brigadistas had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Among other sites, they followed the trail of a Lincoln vet, Wen-Rao Chen of the XVth International Brigade, who lost his life in the battle of...
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In the spring of 1937, a group of English-speaking journalists and filmmakers launched a shortwave radio broadcast from Madrid to tell the world what was happening in Spain firsthand. It found an eager audience all across the United States and Canada.
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Ramon Sender Barayón is a pioneer of US counterculture and the son of Amparo Barayón, who was killed by fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and the novelist Ramón J. Sender. A new documentary by Luis Olano sheds light on his remarkable life.
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ALBA’s teaching resources are used in college and high-school classrooms throughout the United States. A testimonial from the University of Chicago.
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Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who gained national prominence by exposing the Flint, Michigan water crisis in 2015, presented ALBA’s annual Susman Lecture to a packed auditorium on the Wayne State campus in Detroit, Michigan on January 27.
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A decade after its inauguration on the San Francisco Embarcadero, the only government-supported monument to the Lincoln Brigade in the USA has been restored. The following article first appeared in Counterpunch on August 16, 2008, soon after the original dedication ceremonies.
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Dear Friends, We at ALBA would like to express solidarity with all those affected by the COVID crisis. When the brave men and women of the Lincoln Brigade departed on their odyssey for Spain, they were practicing the solidarity that has always been at the heart of our organization. If we wish to endure...
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The 2020 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism goes to No More Deaths in support of its humanitarian efforts to alleviate the suffering and end the fatalities of those crossing the southern border of the United States. The award will be presented at ALBA's Live Online Gala on May 17 at 5 pm EDT.
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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. As you make your plans, please consider joining the Jarama Society by including ALBA in your will or living trust, or naming us as a beneficiary of your estate. ALBA accepts legacy...
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Herbie (Herbert W.) Freeman, 95, died November 1, 2019 in Tucson, AZ, surrounded by family. Herbie was born in Brooklyn, on October 28, 1924, to Samuel and Vishe (Feigenblatt) Freeman. His older brother, Jack, was killed while fighting in Spain with the International Brigades for the Spanish Republic when Herbie was only 14. Herbie...
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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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