Richard Sennett was in his late twenties when he found out his father had served in the International Brigades defending the Spanish Republic. So, it turned out, had his uncle.
Read more »

Dear Friends, “Health care is a human right,” Neal Rosenstein, the President of the Puffin Foundation, said at our annual gala on May 2. “And yet in a country as wealthy as the United States, health care isn’t a right, but all too often a condition of privilege.” The urgent need for health care...
Read more »

Students around the world are invited to submit their work for ALBA’s annual essay prize. The Watt Award, named in honor of Lincoln Brigade volunteer George Watt, awards outstanding work about any aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the global political or cultural struggles against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or the lifetime histories and contributions...
Read more »

Several hundred people from around the world joined on February 21 to attend a panel discussion of the documentary film Invisible Heroes, which tells the story of the African-Americans who joined the Spanish Civil War. The film was made available for screening beforehand. The lively panel featured the director, Jordi Torrent, along with Tim...
Read more »

From late January through early March, ALBA faculty once again partnered with the Massachusetts-based Collaborative for Educational Services to offer a five-week, online professional development institute for teachers. The workshop drew an enthusiastic and committed group of teachers from the United States and Spain, who developed engaging lesson plans to incorporate the history of...
Read more »

ALBA’s annual Susman lecture—offered online this year, register here—will feature Marc Fasanella, who will speak about the art of his father, Lincoln Brigade veteran Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997). A largely self-taught painter, Fasanella was born to an Italian immigrant family in the Bronx.
Read more »

“All you fascists, you are bound to lose,” sang Billy Bragg, the legendary British folk singer and activist, at ALBA’s annual gala on May 2. Bragg was one of the event’s featured musical guests, along with Miriam Elhajli, the cast of the musical Goodbye Barcelona, and Guy Davis—the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and bluesman, whose parents,...
Read more »

Dear Friends, The two main lessons to draw from the last 12 months are not particularly new—but they are crucial nonetheless. First, healthcare is a public good and should be treated as such. And second, the far right is as dangerous as we feared and should be taken very seriously. In relation to the...
Read more »

ALBA’s first event of the year was an interactive workshop featuring the beautiful and heart-rending art of children in wartime. Over 40 people joined two separate sessions conducted by ALBA’s in-house experts, Professors Jo Labanyi (NYU) and Anthony Geist (University of Washington). More information on the exhibit can be found here on ALBA’s website.
Read more »

On May 2, the eleventh ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be awarded to My Brother’s Keeper (MBK), a private, non-profit organization based in Mississippi that works to improve the health and well-being of minority and marginalized populations in the United States. (Press release.)
Read more »

Join us on Sunday, February 21 at 5pm ET for the inaugural event of the Perry Rosenstein Cultural Series—a roundtable discussion on African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, whose stories are told in the documentary Invisible Heroes.
Read more »

ALBA’s second online institute for teachers, titled “The United States and World Fascism,” offered in conjunction with the Massachusetts-based Collaborative for Educational Service, began in late January and will run through February. Participants include History and Spanish teachers from all over the world, including the United States and Spain. Browse ALBA’s educational resources, including...
Read more »

The Tamiment Library will remain closed during the spring 2021 semester due to New York University’s COVID-19 protocols. We are not able to schedule any in-person appointments for external researchers at this time. For those who want limited access to our collections, our staff is continuing to work onsite in a staggered schedule and...
Read more »

One of the most compelling first-person accounts in English from the Spanish Civil War languished in the archives for more than 80 years. Artist and model Kate Mangan (1904-77) was a keen observer of character with a sharp nib on her pen. After traveling to Spain in 1936 in search of her lover, Jan...
Read more »

The Volunteer is proud to present these translated excerpts and images from Las voces de la tierra, a new book in which thirty-three writers pen brief texts about everyday objects recovered during the exhumations of the mass graves of Franco’s victims. The photographs are by the renowned photographer José Antonio Robés, who also curated...
Read more »

How do the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the broader American response to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 appear in introductory college-level United States history textbooks? A survey of a dozen highly regarded textbooks published in the past quarter century reveals a mixed picture. Some ignore altogether the American volunteers who fought alongside the...
Read more »

Grandpa Stops A War: A Paul Robeson Story, by Susan Robeson. Illustrated by Rod Brown. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2020.
Read more »

I resented the world for having taken my mother away from me, explains journalist James Benét, who went to war to fight against fascism in Spain, and no doubt part of my radicalism was that, he says, proud having chosen the right target, the ills of society. I feel that everyone should feel that...
Read more »

Memorial Day is the day traditionally set aside to remember Americans who served in the military. And, yet, Americans who went to Spain to fight fascism are rarely, if ever, included in the remembrances on this day. We would like to change this. In recent years, Canadian volunteers led by Pamela Vivian, and with...
Read more »

Soldados de Franco. Reclutamiento forzoso, experiencia de guerra y desmovilización militar, by Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2020.
Read more »

Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation, edited by Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Read more »

Judge Garzón, the crusading Spanish magistrate and first recipient of the ALBA/Puffin Award, looks back on his turbulent career. “The truth is that my ideas have not changed much.” No Spanish judge has had as many admirers around the world as Baltasar Garzón—the Spanish judge who helped bring about a world in which political...
Read more »

To the Editors: Prof. Helen Graham’s “Why Do So Many Historians Fail to Understand the War in Spain” (December 2020) is a patent attempt to de-politicize the reasons behind and motives for the International Brigades. To use general terms like humanitarian, displacements, migration, ethnicity, and high politics without specifying their context—namely the resistance to...
Read more »

Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press, by Montse Feu. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
Read more »

In June, the Martha Graham Dance Company performed Immediate Tragedy, a long-lost solo piece that Graham performed in 1937 in support of the Spanish Republic. Its reconstruction was only possible thanks to a cache of recently recovered photographs of Graham’s original show. Together with Deep Song, inspired by Lorca, the piece marks a crucial...
Read more »

After the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, not a week went by in Hollywood without a fundraiser for the Republican cause. The film colony was passionately on the side of the Loyalists—a position for which many paid a price in the years of McCarthyism. A look back on a remarkable chapter...
Read more »

From 1939 to 1975 a manor located in the province of La Coruña, Galicia, was used as a summer residence and office by the dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. For the last fifteen years, a diverse group of activists has put the spotlight on the questionable claim of ownership by descendants of the dictator. In...
Read more »

The Dutch photographer Lini Bunjes was among the first foreign volunteers to join the defense of the Spanish Republic. A free-spirited and independent woman, she attracted suspicion from both the Republican and Nationalist authorities and spent several stints in jail. When she left Spain, in January 1941, she was 23, had an infant son,...
Read more »

The war of 1936-39 in Spain had much in common with the many other conflicts being waged in societies across Europe after the First World War, as those who sought to maintain old hierarchies clashed with those striving for change. Yet the evident similarity is one that English-speaking historians often seem oblivious to. What...
Read more »

Isabel Allende, the Chilean author and philanthropist, spoke at ALBA’s Lincoln Brigade Monument Celebration on September 12, 2020. This is what she said.
Read more »

Once again, the annual Watt Essay Award received a record number of submissions from around the world. The jury was especially impressed by the high quality of nearly all the submissions this year. Considering that these students produced this inspiring work during a pandemic as their schools or universities were moving to remote learning...
Read more »

In September, the cabinet of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister, approved the draft for a new Law of Democratic Memory that seeks to go farther than existing legislation, which dates from 2007, in settling the unfinished business of the transition to democracy. The new law would provide material and symbolic reparations for victims...
Read more »

In the fall of 2019, Shannon O'Neill joined the Tamiment-Wagner team and NYU Special Collections as the Curator for the Tamiment-Wagner Collections.
Read more »

Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. The author of many books, including a biography of Thelonious Monk, he co-edited "This Ain't Ethiopia, But It'll Do": African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War (1990) and currently serves on ALBA’s Honorary Board.
Read more »

Dear Friends, No pasaron. They did not pass. As this issue goes to print, we are emerging from one of the most intense election seasons the United States has ever lived through, following four years that have revealed the best and the worst faces of this country. On the one hand, we saw a...
Read more »