For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling Spanish Civil War novel first published in October 1940, is still among his most widely read books. It is also widely misunderstood, says Hemingway scholar Alex Vernon. Vernon teaches at Hendrix College (Arkansas), is the author of Hemingway’s Second War and two army memoirs, and has...
Read more »

Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
Read more »

Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
Read more »

In Burgos, Spain, close to 700 people paid tribute to the victims of Francoist repression and the International Brigades. ALBA’s Nancy Wallach was there.
Read more »

The Biographical dictionary of Argentine volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, by Jerónimo Boragina, has just appeared in its first Argentine edition. The author has also donated his entire archive on the Argentine volunteers and the Spanish solidarity movement in Argentina to the historical archive of the Buenos Aires province. An interview.
Read more »

Peter N. Carroll, Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2024. ALBA Special Edition. 100 pp. In this powerful collection, poet and historian Peter Carroll crafts portraits of some eighty men and women who volunteered to fight in Spain. Carroll observes, “Valuable as the work of historians...
Read more »

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. 432 pp.
Read more »

Ybor City’s history of Latino antifascist activism is now memorialized with a permanent historical marker and a stunning public art mural in the heart of the historic district.
Read more »

Sarah McNamara, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023, 266 pp.
Read more »

The letters of Paul Wendorf, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, have been translated and published in Spain by Salamanca University Press.
Read more »

When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
Read more »

My father, Dave Smith, was a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “Spain changed my whole life,” he said. “I saw a country struggling—ordinary people, peasants, poor people. They couldn’t even read or write, but when these young people came up to the front, we became an integrated army, the people struggling against the...
Read more »

Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
Read more »

Earlier this year, we received an unexpected email from Karen Nussbaum, the legendary labor activist, asking to be put on the mailing list for the Volunteer. She explained that she’d read the magazine during a visit to her father, the actor Mike Nussbaum, a longtime ALBA supporter. One thing led to the other, and...
Read more »

When a visit to Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid was canceled because of Covid, James Fernández instead delivered this lecture. This is the last of two installments.
Read more »

Dear Friends, ALBA connects generations. We see this in our Watt essay contest, which showcases the passionate fascination with which high schoolers, undergrads, and graduate students engage with the legacy of the International Brigades. We see it in the touching video testimonies that grandchildren of vets have been sending us in response to our...
Read more »

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, with support from The Puffin Foundation, is thrilled to announce the creation of the Peter N. Carroll Anti-Fascist Education Fund. The goal of this fund is to expand our efforts to contextualize and disseminate the anti-fascist history of the United States through the experience of the Lincoln Brigade. The...
Read more »

On December 3, a 37-minute videorecording of a performance by the late Bruce Barthol will be featured at the Howard Zinn Book Fair—a project of the San Francisco City College (CCSF) Labor and Community Studies Department.
Read more »

On November 4, the Spanish newspaper Público, one of the country’s most-read online-only dailies, highlighted ALBA’s educational work in a long article by Leire Ariz Sarasketa that also narrated the story of ALBA’s founding and evolution over the years. Last year, ALBA published a curricular guide for Spanish high school teachers and students in...
Read more »

On November 14, the legendary labor activist Karen Nussbaum was featured as part of ALBA’s annual Susman Lecture in an online event moderated by longtime ALBA friend Margo Feinberg.
Read more »

The Watt Essay Prize committee was excited to receive close to sixty submissions this year, surpassing the numbers from the pre-COVID pandemic. Never before did so many undergraduate and graduate students from across the United States and Western Europe submit their work.
Read more »

Read more »

Since April 2018, the Catalan town Corbera d’Ebre has featured a bronze plaque in memory of Robert Hale Merriman, commander of the Lincoln Battalion, who went missing in action nearby in April 1938. A copy of the plaque will be featured in a new monument on the UC Berkeley campus.
Read more »

To the Editors: I was so pleased to see Bruce Barthol on the cover of The Volunteer. I would see him at events in Rohnert Park at the home of Corine Thornton, who died just before her 100th birthday. The memorial lunch was the last time I saw Bruce. Then, at the opening of...
Read more »

Dan Bessie, who passed away on July 1 in Brantôme, France, was born in rural Vermont, where his parents, Lincoln vet Alvah Bessie and Mary Burnett, eked out a hardscrabble existence during the Great Depression. The family lived in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and finally, Southern California. Following high school, Dan became a shipboard...
Read more »

Norah Chase, who died on May 28, 2023, was the daughter of Homer Chase, a Lincoln veteran from New Hampshire. Norah worked as a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College for many years. In the 1980s, she wrote her Ph.D thesis about her grandmother, Elba Chase Nelson, who ran for governor of N.H....
Read more »

Spanish Republicans and the Second World War: Republic Across the Mountains, by Jonathan Whitehead., Philadelphia and South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books, 2021. 304 pp.
Read more »

Generalísimo. Las vidas de Francisco Franco, 1892-2020, by Javier Rodrigo. Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022. 494 pp.
Read more »

¡Brigadistas! An American Anti-Fascist in the Spanish Civil War, by Miguel Ferguson. Edited by Paul Buhle and Fraser Ottanelli. Art by Anne Timmons. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022. 116 pp.
Read more »

All families have secrets, and I discovered mine at a young age, in a box or paper bag, I don’t remember which, in the closet. I knew even then it was a secret, an important secret because no one in my family wanted to talk about my prescient treasure: letters and photographs. I was...
Read more »

Solidarity requires a combination of teaching, learning and encouragement. I’ve never seen anything like the camaraderie surrounding the historical memory of the International Brigades in Spain. I’ve studied one of these guys for about a decade, a Lincoln volunteer who died in 1985. His story is astounding. It amazed me that nobody had ever...
Read more »

The Eblana Club in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, joined in the many celebrations going on this year of the 125th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s birth, when they invited me to address them this past May 25th. The historic club quickly filled to double its capacity, as more than sixty people from Dun Laoghaire and the...
Read more »

Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, James D. Fernández had agreed to visit Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid with a group of students from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. The trip was canceled, and instead, he delivered a zoom lecture to the students about Guernica without Guernica, which we...
Read more »

Bob Ford, who worked in Hollywood and fought in Spain and World War II, suffered relentless surveillance because of his radical past, as did his wife, Augusta Ain. In 1950 they moved to New Zealand—and never looked back. 4 February 1938 We just returned from Madrid. We had rather a good time except the...
Read more »

In 1999, Catherine Wigginton Greene won ALBA’s Watt Award with an essay on Salaria Kea, the only African American nurse to serve in the Spanish Civil War. Twenty-four years later, Wigginton is a successful novelist, filmmaker, and educational consultant whose work still focuses on the themes that drew her to Kea as an undergraduate...
Read more »