The legacy of the Spanish Civil War played a crucial role in the lives of Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, the winners of the ALBA/Puffin Award. But how do we ensure its transmission to younger generations, whose life world is so different that they often have trouble even reading the Lincolns’ hand-written letters? ALBA’s...
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Efforts are ongoing to address the deterioration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade monument in San Francisco. After initial problems of deliberate vandalism were dealt with, the elements began to take their toll on the structure. However, we have been involved in extensive conversations with different offices of the city of San Francisco for well...
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ALBA’s Teaching Institutes continue to break new ground across the United States, reaching more teachers in new communities, expanding opportunities, and seeing exciting results.
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Acceptance speech by Jeremy Scahill on receiving the 2016 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. May 7, 2016. New York. Lydia just pushed me to come here first (crowd laughs.) I really, in all candor, I feel like I shouldn’t be here receiving this award, particularly because I think that my co-recipient, Lydia, is one of the...
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Acceptance speech by Lydia Cacho on receiving the 2016 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. May 7, 2016. New York Thank you so much. I also want to dedicate this award to Mike, Jeremy father. You only see fantastic men that are involved in human rights instead of trying to kill others when you...
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On May 7, the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Right Activism—a cash tribute of $100,000—honored two courageous journalists, Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, for their dedication to exposing corruption, violence, and the abuse of power which are routinely ignored by mainstream media. They do this work under life-threatening conditions of danger and risk. The day’s...
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Maria Thomas, The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931-1936. Brighton, Portland, and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, in collaboration with the Cañada Blanche Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, 2013. xxi + 269 pp.

Live Souls: Citizens and Volunteers of Civil War Spain, by Serge Alternês & Alec Wainman. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2015. 335 pp.
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In the spring of 1937 some twenty students from Brooklyn College volunteered to fight in Spain. This unique exhibit, curated by Prof. Alejandro Alonso, in partnership with ALBA, will cover three aspects: political life on campus in the 30s; the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the debates and confrontations that took place there; and the presence of Spanish Exiles...
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I am the youngest veteran of the Spanish Civil War, born in Barcelona on July 18th, 1930. "Veteran"? Yes. Not a combatant, but a child that together with his mother and brothers survived the fascist Italian and Nazi bombings of Barcelona. My Greek father, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen, and working at Lykes...
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Mark Derby, Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris: New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War (Brighton/Toronto/Chicago: Sussex Academic Press, 2015).

The New Year has barely started and ALBA is already at work on an exciting number of programs and activities.
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Robert Hale Merriman, Chief of Staff of the XV International Brigade, disappeared behind enemy lines. His body was never recovered. What happened? Two memoirs and an interview give conflicting versions.
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Why did the American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War name themselves after Abraham Lincoln? Who first came up with the idea of the “Lincoln Battalion” and when? New information is complicating the long-accepted account.
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In this excerpt from his new book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, Adam Hochschild tells the story of Swarthmore student Joe Selligman (1916-1937), the first American volunteer to join the battle for Madrid. After he left, his parents in Kentucky received an envelope mailed by a friend: “By...
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Richard Bermack is a documentary photographer and writer who has worked primarily for labor unions, including SEIU, the UAW, and the ILWU. In addition to his work on radical and labor history, he has written about and photographed workers involved in children and family services, welfare reform, aiding people with disabilities, and health care...
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This January 19th, exhumation procedures began to recover the remains of Timoteo Mendieta, murdered by the Franco regime in 1939. In 2013, his daughter Ascensión testified before María Servini, the Argentine judge who has investigated Franco’s crimes against humanity since 2010. On Servini’s orders, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory took charge of the exhumation, helped...
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The 2016 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be shared by journalists Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, who have dedicated their careers to exposing corruption, violence and abuse of power. Award ceremony: NYC, Saturday, May 7 (tickets)
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What you leave to friends and loved one--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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Ensure more of your money goes to our mission by lowering costs and supporting our cause without a big one-time hit to your wallet.
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Of particular interest are the photos that Fernández and Argeo have rescued from family albums for Chapter V, which documents the intense pro-Republican mobilization of Spanish American communities all over the country.
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Twenty medical doctors serving in the International Brigades went straight from Spain to China to help the country defend itself against Japanese aggression. They are remembered fondly in China today.
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Las Brigadas internacionales a través del cómic: 1977-2012, Ángel Luis Arjona Márquez, Albacete, 2014.
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Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 296 pages.

Hearty congratulations on the terrific job you have done setting up the huge database on the Volunteers! This is the crucial information and you have made it very accessible, attractive and useful. I finally found an old friend of the family here at last. A splendid job!
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In the September 2015 issue of The Volunteer an obituary of Bobby Hall pointed out that in the 1960s Hall and Jeremiah Stamler "initiated a landmark and successful court case" against HUAC. You failed to mention the third member who walked out and sued HUAC: the vet Milton M. Cohen. Here is a...
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It is always tempting to imagine writers looking over our shoulders when we critique their works, smiling or grimacing as the case may be. The compelling interview that Sebastiaan Faber conducted with Francisco Fernández and their incisive analysis of the “exhumation efforts” in Spain (“An Underground Landscape of Terror,” June 2015) made me...
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Mexico was one of the very few countries to stand by the Second Spanish Republic as it was attacked by fascism—but in practice, not all Mexicans agreed with their government’s position during the Spanish Civil War.
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The trial of the POUM in October 1938 is often seen as a Spanish version of the Soviet “show trial.” But it makes more sense to examine it as an attempt by the Republican government to build stable judicial institutions.
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The George Watt Prize for the best student essays received submissions from across the globe, the various entrants writing on topics of history, literature, politics, and culture of the Spanish Civil War, or the global political and cultural struggles against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or the contributions of the Americans who fought...
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In the fall of 2014, Stanley Payne and Jesús Palacios published a new biography of Francisco Franco. Spanish historian Ángel Viñas, who was finishing up his own book on the dictator, was appalled to find their account riddled with “the most flagrant and, at times, grotesque mistakes, omissions, and misleading interpretations.” This past September,...
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Some soldiers instinctively respond to concepts in international law of which they may not even be aware. When men and women in the military do or see things that offend their deeply held sense of right and wrong, they may experience moral injury, a condition that overlaps with but is not the same as...
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Max Aub (1903-1972) was born in Paris to a German-Jewish family that moved to Spain when he was 11. During the Spanish Civil War, he worked for the Republican government. After Franco’s victory he was arrested in France and spent three years in concentration camps, after which he fled to Mexico. He spent his...
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We have just returned from the Bay Area, where we joined close to 200 Lincoln family members, friends and supporters at our Annual Celebration honoring the Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley. We gathered for an afternoon of songs and to hear California writer and documentary photographer David Bacon, who described how his encounters with...
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All my life I've known about Spain. I grew up singing Freiheit and Viva la Quince Brigada and Los Cuatro Generales, and knew the names of some of the places in Spain where the big battles were fought. I owe a lot to my parents, and to the culture they helped create. They didn't...
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