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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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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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Eminent Spanish Civil War historian Gerald Howson died on 7 June, aged 88
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Marina Ginestà was the 17-year-old militant socialist pictured on a Barcelona rooftop in one of the most memorable images of the Spanish Civil War.
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Dr. Nina Byers, who died on June 5, 2014, was a long-time friend of ALBA’s. As a pioneering theoretical physicist, her work contributed greatly to both the understanding of particle physics and superconductivity.
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One of the last veterans of the International Brigades, Gert (Gerhard) Hoffmann died in Austria on July 8, 2014.
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Hans Landauer, the last surviving Austrian volunteer in the International Brigades, died at his home on July 19. In recent years, he attended many reunions of Spanish Civil War veterans in Spain.
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Bruce Barthol, long-time band leader at ALBA events, was the original bass player for the pioneering rock group Country Joe and the Fish and has performed with a long list of great musicians, from Dave Getz to Pete Seeger.
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Betty Medsger's book The Burglary tells the never-before-told account of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971. A group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—revealed a shocking truth that J. Edgar Hoover had created his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.
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The doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction allows tribunals from any State to prosecute heinous crimes that are an affront to all humanity. It is our most important weapon in the battle against the great criminals of history. Yet the United States is dragging its feet.
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In Spain this past May, the usually dull and boring elections to the European Union’s Parliament produced a sudden shock to the political system. A new two-month-old party led by a 35-year-old, pony-tailed political scientist, appeared out of nowhere—but clearly from the Left—to sweep up a surprising 8 percent of the votes. The result...
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Three 8th-grade students placed fifth at the National History Day Finals for their work on the history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
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When things seem bleakest, hope often sparks.
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Kicking off a busy fall, ALBA worked with teachers in Tampa.
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In October, the Smithsonian is releasing a stunning new edition of its legendary two Folkways albums, Songs of the Spanish Civil War. First published in the early 1960s, these LPs compiled songs recorded on 78s by Pete Seeger, Tom Glazer, Ernst Busch, Bart van der Schelling and others during and shortly after the war....
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Join us for ALBA’s Bay Area Reunion!
Sunday, October 5, 2014 2:00 PM (doors open at 1:00 PM)
Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse
2020 Addison Street Berkeley, California
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Norman Bethune in Spain: Commitment, Crisis and Conspiracy. By David Letherbridge. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press: Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, 2013.)
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Señoritas in Blue. The Making of a Female Political Elite in Franco’s Spain. The National Leadership of the Sección Femenina de la Falange (1936-1977). By Inbal Ofer. (Brighton; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2009.)
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Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936. By Jeremy Treglown. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.)
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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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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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