Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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Dear Friends: I was honored to be elected as chair of ALBA’s Board of Governors in May of this year. ALBA has had a series of dedicated chairs who have advanced the organization’s mission through both good and bad times. I follow Sebastiaan Faber, who served as chair for more than ten years and...
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As a gift to those who donate $125 or more to ALBA, we offer a facsimile reproduction of the 1938 pamphlet Letters from Spain by Joe Dallet to his Wife. The pamphlet includes 30 letters from Joe to Katherine Puening-Dallet relaying his experiences in Spain and his hopes for a better world. After Joe’s...
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Brooklyn high school student Iago Macknik-Conde, who last year was named a History Day finalist with a project on the Lincoln Brigade, won the most recent National History Day competition with his research on the contribution of the Spaniard Bernardo de Gálvez to the United States’ independence movement. Profiled in the national Spanish newspaper...
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Catalonia’s Alvah Bessie Program Reports Progress An article in The Guardian on May 29 reported that the Alvah Bessie Program, through which the government of Catalonia seeks to locate, exhume, identify, and repatriate the remains of International Brigade Volunteers who died during the Spanish Civil War, has been making strides. By now, the program...
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ALBA’s Monthly Film Discussion Series Kicks Off On July 16, ALBA hosted the first session of its new online film discussion series, sponsored by the Peter N. Carroll Anti-Fascist Education Fund, and geared toward both teachers and the general public. The series features in-depth discussions on important Spanish-Civil-War-themed films. Each session is led by...
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This issue's cover (see the print edition here) celebrates the worldwide antifascist movement. In a year where countries across the globe—including the United States—are facing a surge of far-right parties, France saw a revival of the Popular Front, a broad antifascist coalition that managed to hold the Rassemblement National at bay.
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The Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War—www.vscw.ca—has opened new galleries that more than double the number of objects on display. It has also added a French version to the existing Spanish and English ones. The new galleries include: The Civil War in Catalonia, https://www.vscw.ca/index.php/en/node/438, with a version in Catalan. The Civil War in...
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The Spanish Civil War has inspired a rich trove of novels, memoirs, histories, and poetry, with new books coming out all the time. Each month, the FFALB book club gets together online to discuss one of these works, sharing our thoughts about its relevance, new insights, literary merits, and more. Anyone interested is invited...
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I found the article by Raanan Rein in the March, 2024 issue of The Volunteer to be interesting and insightful. But there was just this one phrase that raised the hackles on this Palestinian Jew’s head: “Jewish Palestine.” No such place existed. Rather, there was a place called Palestine, a multicultural home to Jews,...
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Forged in Spain, by Richard Baxell. London: The Clapton Press, 2023. 412pp.
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Dr. Naomi Gabrella Rucker, a loving and devoted mother and grandmother who was an accomplished psychologist and psychoanalyst, died from cancer on April 4, 2024, in Savannah, Georgia. She was 70. Naomi was born in New York City on January 6, 1954, to James Bernard “Bunny” Rucker and Helen Muenich. She spent most of...
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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This year marks the 80th anniversary of many World War II milestones in France, from the D-Day landings in June, 1944, and those of Province in August to the Liberation of Paris. In fact, some activities are already in full swing. For example, on February 2, the Shoah Memorial of Paris opened the exhibition...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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Why we should read the Oscar-winning documentary about Mariupol as a tribute to The Spanish Earth, Joris Ivens’s Civil War classic. Watching Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, which shows the Russian bombing of the Ukrainian city at the beginning of the ongoing war, I thought: “I’ve seen this movie before, if with a...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Dear Friends, As human rights and academic freedom are under threat throughout the world, it was gratifying to hear former winners of the ALBA/Puffin Award speak to each other and to the attentive audience gathered in New York City this past May 4 for this year’s award ceremony. Kate Doyle, the investigative journalist who...
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On April 29, members of the San Francisco Bay Area ALBA community joined staff, faculty, and students at UC Berkeley to celebrate Robert Hale Merriman, first commander of the Lincoln Brigade, in the beautiful Morrison Library on the Berkeley campus, where Merriman studied while a graduate student in economics. The gathering served to raise...
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At its annual meeting in New York City, the ALBA Board of Governors elected longtime board member Aaron Retish as its new Chair. The author of several books on revolutionary Russia, Aaron is a professor of Russian history at Wayne State, where he also oversees the Abraham Lincoln Scholarship program. For ALBA, he has...
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ALBA Celebrates Pride Month On Tuesday, June 25 at 3 pm ET/12 noon PT, ALBA will once again commemorate LGBTQ Pride month with an online event entitled “Telling Our Stories,” featuring Shannon O’Neill and Bettina Aptheker. O’Neill, Curator for the Tamiment-Wagner Collections at NYU Special Collections and ex-officio ALBA board member, will re-acquaint us with...
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“At the Barricades” Previewed at NYU On April 5, the theater company What Will the Neighbors Say? presented a selection of scenes from their current project, At the Barricades, as part of the Fridays on the Patio series at NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center. The preview of the play, which explores stories of volunteers during the...
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In a stirring ceremony on May 4th, the youth organization 18by Vote, represented by its President, Ava Mateo, received the 2024 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. The gathering, which took place in the historic building of the Spanish Benevolent Society on New York’s West 14th St that houses the ALBA office, also featured...
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With deep sadness, I write of the passing of Helene Susman, widow of Bill, at the age 103. She did not go to Spain with the Lincolns nor held a position with the VALB or ALBA, but to me and many others she was a founder of our small organization and a kindred spirit....
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Manuel Tiego, Eulalia's House. Translated by Eric A. Gordon. New York: International Publishing Company, 2022. 160pp.
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Anne Broyles, I’m Gonna Paint! Ralph Fasanella, Artist of the People. Illustrated by Victoria Tentler-Krylov. New York: Holiday House, 2023. 48pp.
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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