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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British and Spanish archaeologists have spent two years investigating Spanish battle sites. American journalist Steve Dinnen joined the dig at Belchite. “We are not here to tell nice stories about the past. The past hurts.”
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“We have to reclaim our history, not discard or forget it,” labor organizer David Bacon advised an enthusiastic crowd honoring the legacy of the Lincoln Brigade at the 79th Bay Area reunion event in Berkeley, California on November 8. His talk, together with tributes to Emilio Silva, this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin...
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When should one government intervene in the affairs of another country? When, if ever, should private civilians violate laws to participate in foreign wars? And how do we teach high school students to think about these questions? ALBA’s Peter Carroll considered these questions at the annual conference of the Ohio Council of Social Studies.
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ALBA’s fifth annual Human Rights Film Festival featured 21 documentary films from 12 countries (four world premieres, 12 New York premieres). The Randall Award went to Among the Believers, about radical Islam and a charismatic cleric in Pakistan.
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In May, 21 organizers from the US participated in a social movement delegation to Spain. The trip was timed to coincide with Spain’s municipal elections on May 24th. The group learned from new political parties that seek to make electoral politics more accountable and democracy more participatory, from social movements working on housing and...
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Julian Bond died on August 14. A few days later, Democracy Now! aired a tribute to him and I was struck by one of the comments by Benjamin Jealous, who was CEO of the NAACP while Julian Bond was President.
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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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The first thing you see as you approach the Civil War Shelters Museum on Gisbert Street in Cartagena are the trees growing out of the mountainside. Their unusual network of thick, exposed roots pushing out of the ground suggests that these ancient trees might have been around since the Bronze Age, witnessing Hannibal as...
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P. D. Murphy, As I Walked Out Through Spain in Search of Laurie Lee (Bristol: Silverwood Books, 2014).
An unpublished poem by Víctor Jiménez Jódar, with translation by ALBA's Antony Geist.
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Progressive organizer Yolanda “Bobby” Hall, a lifelong political activist, social justice advocate and educator who served on ALBA’s Board of Governors, died on June 19 at her home in Oak Park, Illinois. She was 93.
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Lincoln vet and path-breaking composer Conlon Nancarrow was among the dozens of American leftists who no longer felt at home in the United States. After moving to Mexico he began a 40-year career of composing for the player piano. In June, New York's Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated his work with a 10-day...
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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
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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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
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