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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Some 114,000 Spaniards lay in unmarked mass graves strewn all over the Iberian Peninsula. Only Cambodia has more densely populated killing fields. These are not men and women killed at the front during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39); they are victims of systematic extrajudicial assassinations carried out by Francoist forces during and after that...
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ALBA is proud to announce the winner of the 2015 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism--the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. (Tickets | Press Release | Comunicado de prensa.) Founded by journalist Emilio Silva in 2000, the Association has...
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Making gifts to ALBA in your will is an important source of funding to continue our work. A gift in your will keeps our educational programs growing in the long term. While gifts for specific purposes are always welcome, ALBA is especially grateful for unrestricted gifts that can be used where they are needed...
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Double your donation! As a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, ALBA is eligible for many employers’ matching gifts programs. Many companies sponsor matching gift programs that allow their employees to make donations to charitable organizations, which the company then doubles or, in some cases, triples! Be sure to submit your ALBA receipts to your Human...
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John Kedzie Jacobs, The Stranger in the Attic: Finding a Lost Brother in His Letters Home (Lexington, KY: Jacobs, 2013).
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ALBA is deeply honored by our donors’ confidence and profoundly grateful for their generosity.
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Arantza Cazalis Shuey, Growing Up in a Time of War. Memoirs of a Young Basque girl’s thirteen-year Odyssey as a refugee of the Spanish Civil War. Third Place Press, 2011.
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It was thrilling to receive such positive responses to our September issue, featuring Pablo Iglesias, the 36-year-old political scientist who may well be Spain’s next Prime Minister. (Even Pablo himself took to Twitter to say how honored he was to be on our cover.) Events in Spain continue to develop in an exciting direction;...
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Amanda Vaill. Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
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Florida educator Dale Hueber did not follow the usual path to teaching history.
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Graphic novelist Paco Roca worked with ALBA’s Bob Coale to chronicle the odyssey of “La Nueve,” the company of Spanish Republicans who fought the Nazis with General LeClerc.
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Preston’s revealing exposé of Carrillo’s ruthless rise to power within the Party—a career strewn with lies, crimes, and betrayals—destroyed the positive image that Carrillo had managed to build in the wake of the democratic Transition.
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Paul Preston’s new biography of Santiago Carrillo, the legendary Spanish Communist leader, stirred up serious controversy when it came out in Spain last year. In this exclusive excerpt, Preston recounts Carrillo's involvement in the 1944 attempt to invade Spain from France.
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Snow flurries whipped through the freezing air as 22-year-old Clarence Forrester crunched his way through the snow from the Minneapolis Auditorium, thoughts of a much warmer land an ocean away crowding his mind. An hour earlier, he’d heard students from the University of Madrid plead the cause of the Spanish Republic in its war...
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Following the Spanish Civil War, the victorious dictator Francisco Franco used archaeology to legitimate his power as well as the official history of the war. Today, many Spanish people are working to change the official history to include those who the Franco regime erased or demonized. In modern times there has been a movement...
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The Watt Prize awards excellence in student writing about any aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the struggle against fascism, or the lifetime histories of the Americans who fought in Spain.
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On a sunny October Sunday, the city of Berkeley still buzzing about the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, many alumni of that good fight, together with family and friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, came to the Freight & Salvage Coffee House to pay homage to the anti-fascist volunteers and veterans who...
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ALBA granted the first Harry Randall Award to the documentary 1971, a startling portrait of the civilians who uncovered Hoover’s secret FBI.
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More than 80 high school teachers from New York City and New Jersey participated in back-to-back ALBA institutes during the first week of November. As in most ALBA classrooms, the majority of teachers work in Social Studies—including US History, World History, and Government—but these groups also had significant numbers of Spanish teachers. Brooklyn’s Abraham...
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While British literature about the Spanish Civil War has been widely celebrated, the story of how artists responded has remained largely untold. From 8 November Pallant House Gallery in Chichester will present “Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War”, the first major exhibition to examine the involvement of British visual artists...
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A memorial to the evacuation on a British ship of some 3,000 Spanish Republicans in the final days of the Spanish Civil War was unveiled on 30 March – almost exactly 75 years since the Stanbrook set sail from Alicante on 28 March 1939.
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IBMT conference focuses on cultural impact and legacy of the war in Spain
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“Fear and Loathing in La Liga by Sid Lowe (New York: Nation Books, 2014).
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Artist’s short life to be remembered on special IBMT trip to Aragon Front
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Original British Battalion banner on display at Newhaven Fort
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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War. By Eric R. Smith. (Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 2013.)
Making gifts to ALBA in your will is an important source of funding to continue our work. A gift in your will keeps our educational programs growing in the long term. While gifts for specific purposes are always welcome, ALBA is especially grateful for unrestricted gifts that can be used where they are needed...
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The last known International Brigade veteran living in Britain, Philip Tammer, died in London on 28 January 2014, aged 98.
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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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