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 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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¡Brigadistas! An American Anti-Fascist in the Spanish Civil War, by Miguel Ferguson. Edited by Paul Buhle and Fraser Ottanelli. Art by Anne Timmons. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022. 116 pp.
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All families have secrets, and I discovered mine at a young age, in a box or paper bag, I don’t remember which, in the closet. I knew even then it was a secret, an important secret because no one in my family wanted to talk about my prescient treasure: letters and photographs. I was...
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Solidarity requires a combination of teaching, learning and encouragement. I’ve never seen anything like the camaraderie surrounding the historical memory of the International Brigades in Spain. I’ve studied one of these guys for about a decade, a Lincoln volunteer who died in 1985. His story is astounding. It amazed me that nobody had ever...
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The Eblana Club in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, joined in the many celebrations going on this year of the 125th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s birth, when they invited me to address them this past May 25th. The historic club quickly filled to double its capacity, as more than sixty people from Dun Laoghaire and the...
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Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, James D. Fernández had agreed to visit Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid with a group of students from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. The trip was canceled, and instead, he delivered a zoom lecture to the students about Guernica without Guernica, which we...
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Bob Ford, who worked in Hollywood and fought in Spain and World War II, suffered relentless surveillance because of his radical past, as did his wife, Augusta Ain. In 1950 they moved to New Zealand—and never looked back. 4 February 1938 We just returned from Madrid. We had rather a good time except the...
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In 1999, Catherine Wigginton Greene won ALBA’s Watt Award with an essay on Salaria Kea, the only African American nurse to serve in the Spanish Civil War. Twenty-four years later, Wigginton is a successful novelist, filmmaker, and educational consultant whose work still focuses on the themes that drew her to Kea as an undergraduate...
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Sarah Watling is an award-winning author who recently published Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, in which she weaves together the stories of women whose lives were affected by the Spanish Civil War, including Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf, Salaria Kea, and Gerda Taro. Your first...
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Dear Friends, The three threads running through this issue are directly linked to ALBA’s mission and history. The first thread underscores how important it is to identify fascism wherever it shows up—and to face it head-on. We don’t have to explain to you why that is particularly important today. “We can no longer teach...
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As part of the Alvah Bessie Program, launched last year, the government of Catalonia has confirmed the identities and places of death of 212 International Brigade volunteers from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands who died in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Next, the government will attempt to document the place of death for...
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In June, Iago Macknik-Conde, the New York high school senior featured in our last issue, performed his play about the Lincoln Brigade at the National History Day competition for Senior Individual Performance in Maryland, winning an Outstanding Entry medal. Together with his mother, Dr. Susana Martínez-Conde, Iago wrote ALBA’s summer fundraising appeal and recorded...
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Labor Activist Karen Nussbaum to be Featured in Susman Lecture November 14 This year’s Susman Lecture will feature longtime labor activist Karen Nussbaum, co-founder in 1972 of 9to5: Organization of Women Office Workers and founding director of Working America. Born in Chicago Illinois into an activist family, Nussbaum joined the anti-war movement as a...
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Sacco and Vanzetti: Film Screening and Discussion Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—two Italian immigrant anarchists who were accused of a murder in 1920 and executed in Boston in 1927 after a notoriously prejudiced trial—are the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti, a documentary by ALBA board member Peter Miller that was screened and discussed at...
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The Right’s culture war on schools, universities, and history teachers—thinly disguised as a crusade against straw men like “divisive concepts” and “critical race theory”—is showing no sign of letting up. According to a tracking project at the UCLA Law School, between September 2020 and July 2023, “a total of 214 local, state, and federal...
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As the labor movement occupied the front pages, in other words, so did news about fascism spreading across Europe. It was no coincidence that many union members saw their struggle as part of a united front against fascism and volunteered to fight in Spain.
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Has fascism arrived in the United States? Will it soon? Or has it been living among us for many years? These are the questions that drive the twelve essays gathered in Fascism in America: Past and Present, a new collection edited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, two prominent historians of the Holocaust.
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