“There is no smooth easy road in the direction of progress,” wrote Evelyn Hutchins, the Brigadista truck driver who made countless trips across dusty furrows during the Spanish Civil War. Inspired by Evelyn and her comrades, ALBA does its part to further ideals of social justice and human rights, past and present. While...
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Thanks to the funds provided by the 2015 ALBA/Puffin Award, Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has been able to continue its much-needed work location and exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, identifying the remains, and returning them to their families.
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Timothy Johnson takes over this month as Head of Tamiment Library, whose outstanding holdings include the ever-expanding ALBA collection. Johnson will be working with Assistant Curator and Public Services Librarian Kate Donovan. A conversation about plans, challenges, and legacies.
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(English translation.) El tiempo y la justicia son inseparables: es imposible hacer justicia sin tener una conciencia del tiempo. El tiempo no sólo pasa para los muertos; también pasa para los vivos–los vivos que están esperando, al borde de la fosa, para el retorno de los restos de sus seres queridos. Están esperando a...
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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. Help 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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José Alejandro Ortiz Carrión with Teresita Torres Rivera, Voluntarios de da Libertad. Puertorriqueños en defensa de la República Española 1936-1939 (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2015).

Richard Rhodes, Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015). 

The last known International Brigade veteran in France, César Covo, died in March in Rennes, France, just a few weeks from his 103rd birthday. His death marks the silent turning of a historic page as he was most certainly the last surviving IB veteran of the battle of Madrid.
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I wasn’t even born, never saw a soldier point a rifle into the face of a woman, her hair beginning to gray, run red. I witness from a distance the dark-eyed girl in Capa’s photo snuggled on a rice sack in a train station. Her pose wistful: to where railroad tracks began and will...
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An exhibit in Hamburg displays images of the Chapaiev Battalion taken by soldiers and Gerda Taro, from the collection of Alfred Kantorowicz and the ICP.
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My formative experiences took place in Italy within a political culture deeply shaped by the values of international solidarity, social justice, and antifascism that motivated the women and men of the International Brigades.
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Pierre Daura, John Rossen, and Herman Bottcher—a Catalan painter, an American factory worker and a German carpenter—forged a close friendship in the trenches of Spain. A Japanese mortar round, a poem, and a painting united their lives, leaving a lasting artistic legacy.
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Time and justice are inseparable: it is impossible to do justice without a proper awareness of time. Time does not only pass for the dead; it also passes for the living—the living who are waiting, at the side of the graves, for the return of their family members’ remains. They are waiting for a...
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Cultural anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz has spent the last 13 years of his life studying the impact of Civil War exhumations in Spain, working in close collaboration with groups like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Thanks to their efforts, Spanish citizens have exhumed more than 6,000 bodies since 2000—most of them civilian...
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Master Teacher Kelley Brown speaks about the rise of the Common Core and her experience teaching with ALBA’s materials in Massachusetts.
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In March and April, ALBA’s Peter N. Carroll and Sebastiaan Faber worked with more than two dozen high school teachers in Newton, Massachusetts, and Columbus, Ohio to develop human-rights lesson plans based on primary materials from the Spanish Civil War. The March workshop, hosted by Michael Kozuch at South Newton High School, was organized...
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This letter, from New York City Chancellor of Education Carmen Fariña, was read at the ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony on May 9 in New York. Presenting it was Alyce Barr, the daughter of Lincoln Brigade veteran Reuben Barr, who currently serves as deputy executive director in the Office of Interschool Collaborative Learning in the city’s Department of...
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Why should we care about the past? This is one of the essential questions we ask when we work with students and teachers. We believe it is a question worth pondering, and worth answering thoughtfully.
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Here is a video summary and a photo gallery of our Annual Celebration and Award Ceremony in New York City, May 9, 2015, at the Japan Society.
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Emilio Silva, founding president of Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, was in New York to receive the fifth ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Spain’s transition to democracy, he said, failed to address the country’s moral debt to the thousands of victims of violence during the Spanish Civil War and the...
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We emailed you a while ago about questions regarding Francisco Franco, as I was in a group that was creating a documentary about him.
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Pablo Iglesias, leader of the grass-roots political movement PODEMOS, paid an intense three-day visit to New York in mid-February, where he was interviewed, among others, by Amy Goodman. When asked if he intends for Spain to meet its obligations, under international law, to investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity committed during the Spanish Civil...
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We welcome and thank the members of the newly established Jarama Society, a group of individuals who decided to include ALBA in their estate plans. These gifts build our endowment and keep our educational mission alive: Phil Bereano, Washington • Nancy Bishop, Illinois • Claire Carsman, California • Richard Hershcopf, Colorado • Elizabeth and Marjorie Liss in honor...
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Early reviews are rolling for the newly-released Smithsonian Folkways album Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2. Royalties go to ALBA!
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Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2014).

Paul Preston, The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo (New York: William Collins: 2015).

Heart of Spain - A Musical of the Spanish Civil War, created by ALBA’s Peter Glazer and Eric Bain Peltoniemi, a composer from St. Paul, Minnesota, comes to the stage for a special performance in Berkeley on March 30.
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Four years ago, Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street merchant unable to obtain licenses to operate his business without local harassment, immolated himself in desperation. His death set off protests throughout the Arab world and sparked a two-year series of youth demonstrations, lasting through 2013, that were remarkable for their scope and intensity but also...
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Writers and soldiers alike saw Spain as the first battlefield of World War II. In the title essay of his new book, excerpted here, historian Peter N. Carroll traces the war’s legacy, from the shocking bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian air forces to the attacks on civilians and...
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Among the high school teachers who attended ALBA’s teaching institute at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington last November was Dean Burrier Sanchis, a Spanish teacher at Elk Grove High School near Chicago, and the grandson of Lincoln veteran Vincent Sanchis Amades. Dean brought along a letter his grandfather wrote soon after he was released...
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Seventy years after the liberation of Paris from German occupation, the National Archives of Paris opened "La Collaboration, 1940-1945," an exhibition exploring multiple facets of French collaboration with the enemy.
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A Clemente Bernad
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A poem by the Spanish writer Manuel Rivas, who nominated the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory for this year's ALBA/Puffin Award. Photography by Clemente Bernad.
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The threads of the past are woven into the fabric of the present. That is what we mean when we talk about the Lincoln Brigade as a legacy: we acknowledge that the lives of the volunteers, and the values that drove them, continue to be important today. A legacy is a gift, but it...
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