At its annual board meeting in early May, ALBA welcomed its newest member, Steve Birnbaum, a Bay Area labor attorney specializing in workers’ compensation under the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Act. Steve has long been fascinated with the history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and will be a welcome addition to the board. For...
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This photograph of Lincoln brigaders Bill Aalto, Alex Kunslich and Irv Goff, with a Spanish comrade, depicts something rare, possibly unique. But unfortunately, all physical copies of it are lost—or, at least, their whereabouts are unknown.
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Stuart Christie, who died in August 2020, was best known as the 18-year-old Scottish anarchist who, in the summer 1964, was part of an attempt to assassinate General Francisco Franco. It was only the beginning of a long life dedicated to left-wing activism.
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The day after Franco’s troops entered Barcelona, Otília Castellví, a young seamstress, woke up to a city she could barely recognize.
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Lincoln veteran Hugo Heurich (1908-1982) was born in Germany and had emigrated to the US in 1929. He arrived in Spain in March 1937 and returned to the US in December 1938. In November 2020, his great-nephew, Armin Heurich, contacted ALBA in November 2020 looking for additional information to include in his great uncle’s oral history, These...
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After a yearslong campaign in the face of official resistance, a working-class Spanish soccer club can finally claim the cup they rightfully won during the civil war.
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Bruce Barthol, a fixture at the ALBA/VALB reunions, was the unapologetic, rebellious, musical heart of the Tony award-winning, never silent, always revolutionary San Francisco Mime Troupe. With sardonic wit, cutting sarcasm, a vast knowledge of history, and a broad understanding of everything political, Bruce Barthol wrote lyrics that outraged, broke hearts, and inspired. A...
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Few of songs in the antifascist repertoire became as popular as the “Song of the Peat Bog Soldiers,” written ninety years ago at the Börgermoor concentration camp. A history.
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The present is confusing because we don’t know what the future will look like. Still, some things are crystal clear.
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Eighty-five years ago, a dozen volunteers, part of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, lost their lives while providing cover for their retreating comrades in the town of Azuara. On March 11, 2023, Azuara hosted a tribute to these long-forgotten anti-Fascist fighters,
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For close to ten years, the historian Michael Koncewicz, the Michael Nash Research Scholar at Tamiment Library, worked with the ALBA collection on a daily basis. In April, he left the library to become Associate Director at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The author of They Said No To Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up...
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Iago Macknik-Conde, a high school student from New York City, performed his new one-man play, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade: The First Desegregated American Fighting Force for the National History Day competition this spring. He won 1st place for Senior Individual Performance at the New York City Regional and New York State Contests, moving to...
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As this issue is going to print, the ALBA office is busy preparing a series of events for the summer and fall.
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Between workshops, screenings, and panel discussions, the past couple of months have been busy for the ALBA staff and board. Here's an overview of our programming since the last issue of The Volunteer came out.
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At a moving ceremony in New York City on May 6, Rachael Guerra-Cordero de Lorenzo accepted the 2023 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism on behalf of Indigenous Women Rising (IWR). “Indigenous people’s rights throughout the world have been trampled by colonialism, disrupting our connections with each other, our children, our land and all...
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Kate Mangan, Never more alive: Inside the Spanish Republic. The Clapton Press, 2020. 346pp.
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Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. By Matthew F. Delmont. Viking, 2022, 374 pp.
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This spring, NYU’s Kimmel Windows—a 13-window exhibition space spanning LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street—will feature Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War, put together by students.
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Al Wasserman, 92, died under a blood moon in Oakland, California, on November 7, 2022.
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James Stewart Polshek, one of the leading architects of his time, passed away on September 9, 2022, in New York City. He was 91 years old.
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Shortly after the 1936 coup, Unamuno surprised many when he publicly expressed his support for the rebellious military. Although he eventually realized he had made a mistake, neither he or his reputation ever fully recovered. What drove him?
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Audio-visual digital scholarship is an emerging form that offers exciting new avenues for academics to disseminate their work online, present at conferences, and engage with students in the classroom. Three years ago, when I was on sabbatical in Barcelona, I was introduced to the genre through the feminist film scholar Barbara Zecchi, Professor of...
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While the cellist Pablo Casals became an international symbol for Catalan culture and anti-Franco resistance, the reputation of his pupil Gaspar Cassadó is limited to the music world, and his national roots are often overlooked. Cassadó’s reputation never fully recovered from a public fallout with his maestro.
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Daniel Millstone, a retired attorney in New York City, is the son of George Millstone (1901-1967), a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and Dorothy Loeb (1907-1977), who during the Spanish Civil War worked in France and Spain for the Committee for Spanish Children. A lifelong activist himself, Millstone worked for Students for a...
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Framing its protagonist’s journey to defend Spanish freedom as an extension of Palestinian Arab resistance at home, Hussein Yassin’s novel sheds light on the turbulent history and the political and social contexts of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine.
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Six students were recognized in this year’s George Watt Prize for their outstanding essays on the Spanish Civil War. The committee read through dozens of wonderful submissions from across the United States and Western Europe in what was, once again, a reminder of how many students appear interested in the Spanish Civil War.
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The fight against fascism, in all its guises, has always required broad alliances: networks of people and organizations who realize that the threat to democracy is dangerous enough to warrant collective action, even if not everyone sees eye to eye on everything. This is why, two years after Hitler’s rise to power, the Popular...
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After attending an ALBA workshop, Charlie Christ joined ALBA as an intern to work with Chris Brooks on the biographical database. “The Lincolns were incredibly diverse, representing the full spectrum of the American and international community. Yet as I dove deeper into their lives, one trend in particular struck me—their indelible impact on the...
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When Cora Cuenca, an ALBA workshop alumna, teaches journalism to undergraduates in Seville, she invites them to consider the Spanish Civil War in personal terms. The legacies of the war, she writes, continue to weigh on Spain: “Education is political. There are no gray areas when dealing with fascism.”
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A preview of ALBA's busy Spring calendar.
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ALBA's events in December and January drew hundreds of participants.
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Fifty years after Roe v. Wade, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is pleased to announce that the 2023 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will go to Indigenous Women Rising (IWR), which is committed to honoring Native and Indigenous People’s inherent right to equitable and culturally safe health options through accessible health education,...
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As this issue goes to press, the ALBA office is busy finalizing the event calendar for January, February and March, which will include online workshops and film screenings as part of the ongoing Perry Rosenstein Cultural Series. To stay informed, keep an eye out for our email newsletters (sign up through info@alba-valb.org), connect with us...
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Following a majority vote in the Senate, Spain’s new Law of Democratic Memory went into effect on October 21. Presented as an update to the 2007 memory law, the new legislation seeks to strengthen the support for victims of the war and the Franco dictatorship, including the exhumation of mass graves. The law also...
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Civil rights activist Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall died August 29, 2022, in Guanajuato, Mexico. As a member of a politically liberal family, she engaged in activism from an early age. She was born June 27, 1929, in New Orleans to Herbert Midlo and Ethel Samuelson. Her father was a Jewish immigrant, from what is...
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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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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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Please find attached photos of my visits to the graves of Lester Rowlson and Tersil Obriot last weekend. I left a brigade flag and a fresh white rose at each. ,,, I was also proud to include aspects of my Clapton CFC scarf; you might have heard of this small football club in London that...
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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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