We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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If we have learned one thing from political and judicial developments over the past couple of years, it’s that we cannot trust that the basic rights that past generations fought so hard to conquer are, and will remain, secure.
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The overwhelming response from the grandchildren of Lincoln veterans to ALBA’s invitation to submit a video testimony has given rise to a webpage featuring 20 moving videos. See alba-valb.org/grand-tribute-project/ for details and stay tuned for an event in the fall featuring these testimonies. You can also click on the thumbnails below. Tribute to:...
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Starting this spring, ALBA will launch a new series of workshops for teachers and the general public as part of the Peter N. Carroll Fund for Anti-Fascist Education: a Spanish Civil War Film club. Every three weeks, an expert will lead a discussion about a feature film inspired by the war in Spain. For...
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On April 14, the anniversary of the Second Spanish Republic, ALBA invites you to attend a theatrical performance of George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, written by Dan and Molly Watt and based on the letters that ALBA co-founder George Watt and his partner Ruth wrote to each other...
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ALBA Features Art Shields, Labor Reporter & Activist On January 25, ALBA’s Nancy Wallach and Josie Yurek, along with Richard Bermack, hosted a widely attended online event on Art Shields (1888-1988), a labor reporter for the Daily Worker who was in Madrid in 1939 to cover the last stand of the Spanish Republic when...
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The 2024 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be awarded this May 4 to 18by Vote, an organization that creates sustainable civic leadership among young people who have been historically excluded from positions of leadership and power. Founded in response to low youth voter turnout in the 2016 general election, 18byVote has since...
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For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling Spanish Civil War novel first published in October 1940, is still among his most widely read books. It is also widely misunderstood, says Hemingway scholar Alex Vernon. Vernon teaches at Hendrix College (Arkansas), is the author of Hemingway’s Second War and two army memoirs, and has...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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In Burgos, Spain, close to 700 people paid tribute to the victims of Francoist repression and the International Brigades. ALBA’s Nancy Wallach was there.
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The Biographical dictionary of Argentine volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, by Jerónimo Boragina, has just appeared in its first Argentine edition. The author has also donated his entire archive on the Argentine volunteers and the Spanish solidarity movement in Argentina to the historical archive of the Buenos Aires province. An interview.
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Peter N. Carroll, Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2024. ALBA Special Edition. 100 pp. In this powerful collection, poet and historian Peter Carroll crafts portraits of some eighty men and women who volunteered to fight in Spain. Carroll observes, “Valuable as the work of historians...
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The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. 432 pp.
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Ybor City’s history of Latino antifascist activism is now memorialized with a permanent historical marker and a stunning public art mural in the heart of the historic district.
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Sarah McNamara, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023, 266 pp.
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The letters of Paul Wendorf, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, have been translated and published in Spain by Salamanca University Press.
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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My father, Dave Smith, was a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “Spain changed my whole life,” he said. “I saw a country struggling—ordinary people, peasants, poor people. They couldn’t even read or write, but when these young people came up to the front, we became an integrated army, the people struggling against the...
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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Earlier this year, we received an unexpected email from Karen Nussbaum, the legendary labor activist, asking to be put on the mailing list for the Volunteer. She explained that she’d read the magazine during a visit to her father, the actor Mike Nussbaum, a longtime ALBA supporter. One thing led to the other, and...
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![When Did World War II Start? And When Will It End? Reflections inspired by <em>Guernica</em> [part 2]](https://albavolunteer.org/wp-content/themes/volunteer/thumb.php?src=https://albavolunteer.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Guernica_United_Nations.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1&q=80)
When a visit to Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid was canceled because of Covid, James Fernández instead delivered this lecture. This is the last of two installments.
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Dear Friends, ALBA connects generations. We see this in our Watt essay contest, which showcases the passionate fascination with which high schoolers, undergrads, and graduate students engage with the legacy of the International Brigades. We see it in the touching video testimonies that grandchildren of vets have been sending us in response to our...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, with support from The Puffin Foundation, is thrilled to announce the creation of the Peter N. Carroll Anti-Fascist Education Fund. The goal of this fund is to expand our efforts to contextualize and disseminate the anti-fascist history of the United States through the experience of the Lincoln Brigade. The...
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On December 3, a 37-minute videorecording of a performance by the late Bruce Barthol will be featured at the Howard Zinn Book Fair—a project of the San Francisco City College (CCSF) Labor and Community Studies Department.
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On November 4, the Spanish newspaper Público, one of the country’s most-read online-only dailies, highlighted ALBA’s educational work in a long article by Leire Ariz Sarasketa that also narrated the story of ALBA’s founding and evolution over the years. Last year, ALBA published a curricular guide for Spanish high school teachers and students in...
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On November 14, the legendary labor activist Karen Nussbaum was featured as part of ALBA’s annual Susman Lecture in an online event moderated by longtime ALBA friend Margo Feinberg.
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The Watt Essay Prize committee was excited to receive close to sixty submissions this year, surpassing the numbers from the pre-COVID pandemic. Never before did so many undergraduate and graduate students from across the United States and Western Europe submit their work.
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Since April 2018, the Catalan town Corbera d’Ebre has featured a bronze plaque in memory of Robert Hale Merriman, commander of the Lincoln Battalion, who went missing in action nearby in April 1938. A copy of the plaque will be featured in a new monument on the UC Berkeley campus.
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To the Editors: I was so pleased to see Bruce Barthol on the cover of The Volunteer. I would see him at events in Rohnert Park at the home of Corine Thornton, who died just before her 100th birthday. The memorial lunch was the last time I saw Bruce. Then, at the opening of...
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Dan Bessie, who passed away on July 1 in Brantôme, France, was born in rural Vermont, where his parents, Lincoln vet Alvah Bessie and Mary Burnett, eked out a hardscrabble existence during the Great Depression. The family lived in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and finally, Southern California. Following high school, Dan became a shipboard...
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Norah Chase, who died on May 28, 2023, was the daughter of Homer Chase, a Lincoln veteran from New Hampshire. Norah worked as a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College for many years. In the 1980s, she wrote her Ph.D thesis about her grandmother, Elba Chase Nelson, who ran for governor of N.H....
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Spanish Republicans and the Second World War: Republic Across the Mountains, by Jonathan Whitehead., Philadelphia and South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books, 2021. 304 pp.
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Generalísimo. Las vidas de Francisco Franco, 1892-2020, by Javier Rodrigo. Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022. 494 pp.
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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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