The first in a series of online roundtable gatherings about the challenges and opportunities of teaching antifascist history today took place on April 16, focusing on the situation in American higher education. For 90 minutes, Kirsten Weld (Harvard), Bill Mullen (Purdue), and Deborah Cohn (Indiana Bloomington) discussed questions raised by ALBA’s moderator, Sebastiaan Faber,...
Read more »
At a moving and inspirational ceremony on May 2 in New York City, two ALBA/Puffin Awards for Human Rights Activism were awarded to Bay Resistance and Unión del Barrio, two California-based organizations.
Read more »
Leaf through the print edition of The Volunteer.
Read more »
I am dedicating my contribution to ALBA to a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who was born and raised in Galicia, Spain.
Read more »
Victor Grossman was a lifelong communist, journalist, and bridge-builder between the United States and the socialist world.
Read more »
Peter Davis, who died in December, was an activist filmmaker in the school of Joris Ivens.
Read more »
Giles Tremlett, El Generalísimo: a Biography of Francisco Franco. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
Read more »
The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
Read more »
China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
Read more »
Lindsey Tyne spent much of last summer carefully studying more than two hundred posters from the Spanish Civil War that were first brought to the United States by the surviving veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. “It was an incredibly educational experience,” she told me.
Read more »
The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
Read more »
Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
Read more »
Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
Read more »
What is it like for Spanish high school students to learn about the International Brigades today? History teacher Ioseba Landa reports from the trenches.
Read more »
Ninety years is a particularly significant interval of time, as it matches, more or less, the limits of a human being’s lifespan.
Read more »
The painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), whose work is on display in a long-overdue MoMA retrospective, spent his formative years in Spain—where in 1936 he joined the defense of the Second Republic.
Read more »
This past November 4, the Spanish government honored a promise made in the 2022 Law of Democratic Memory by approving the applications for Spanish citizenship for some 170 descendants of International Brigade volunteers. The group included thirty family members of the Lincolns. “My father went to Spain to fight fascism—and now I may have...
Read more »
In another year of strong submissions from students across the United States and Europe, the jury of the Watt Essay prize was pleased to award prizes to six promising scholars.
Read more »
As this issue is going to print, ALBA’s Human Rights Committee is hard at work finalizing the process of selecting this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Keep an eye on your email and social media for an announcement. Jack Mayerhofer, chair of ALBA’s Human Rights Committee said, “We are...
Read more »
On Sunday, December 7, at a holiday gathering in NYC, descendants of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, ALBA board members, and supporters gathered under the theme, “The Things We Carry.” Brought together by familial ties and mission, descendants of ALB vets reflected on the artifacts and memories they carry on behalf of their...
Read more »
In February 1937, American volunteers saw their first military action in the Spanish Civil War, fighting as part of the International Brigades in the struggle to defend Madrid. With little training, poor equipment, and none of the promised air and artillery support, the Lincolns took part in the attack on strategic Pingarrón Hill. Raked...
Read more »
Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, trans. Damion Searls Princeton University Press. 129 pp. $24.95
Read more »
Sarah Watling, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 372 pp.
Read more »
In six hour-long episodes, two historians discuss their ancestors, attempting to describe their family members’ possible frames of mind amid war.
Read more »
Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
Read more »
The climate of the Cold War was anti-radical—but it was also white supremacist, as Paul Robeson experienced firsthand. Yet it didn’t faze him, Lindsey Swindall explains. “He not only refused to stop speaking against militarism, segregation, and colonialism, but found new ways to disseminate his message.”
Read more »
Levante UD, the Spanish soccer club that recently recovered its 1937 Cup of Free Spain, has another victory to celebrate. Our football correspondent reports.
Read more »
Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
Read more »
After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
Read more »
For Miguel G. Morales, the archive is an endless treasure trove. His new short on Cuban volunteers in the Spanish war brings it to life. Next up: a feature-length project on the Lincoln Brigade.
Read more »
Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
Read more »
Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
Read more »
Targeted by the far right, Rutgers historian Mark Bray and his family went into exile in October. Speaking with The Volunteer from Madrid, he reflects on the current political situation. “Fascism shamelessly takes over institutions that, under liberal norms, are supposed to remain neutral.”
Read more »
Dear Friends, Since the never-ending news cycle has us all gasping for air, it’s hard to recall what life was like last week—let alone last year. Still, it will be a while before we forget this past November 4. For one, it’s not every day that a politician opens a victory speech quoting Eugene...
Read more »
More than 30 New York City teachers and others joined ALBA’s annual, full-day teaching workshop on November 4. Titled “The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond,” the workshop guided participants through ten modules—with primary texts, videos, and lesson plans—that seek to recast the narrative...
Read more »
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
Read more »
Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
Read more »
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
Read more »
A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
Read more »
In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
Read more »
On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
Read more »
The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
Read more »
Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
Read more »
The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
Read more »
My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
Read more »
ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
Search the Database