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...
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Grandpa Stops A War: A Paul Robeson Story, by Susan Robeson. Illustrated by Rod Brown. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2020.
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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...
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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...
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Soldados de Franco. Reclutamiento forzoso, experiencia de guerra y desmovilización militar, by Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2020.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press, by Montse Feu. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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Isabel Allende, the Chilean author and philanthropist, spoke at ALBA’s Lincoln Brigade Monument Celebration on September 12, 2020. This is what she said.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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(Register here.) Following the first successful online workshop this past summer, ALBA and the Collaborative for Educational Services are proud to announce a new online workshop for teachers grades 4-12 (Social Studies, Spanish, English Language Arts, & other subjects)
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Forced online by the ongoing pandemic, ALBA’s events have been generating strong interest from around the world. On September 12, ALBA’s Bay Area friends organized an 85-minute celebration of the newly restored national monument to the Lincoln Brigade in San Francisco. Hosted by Richard Bermack and featuring film footage by Vicente Franco, the program...
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Who were the soldiers who served in Franco’s insurgent army? Until recently, few historians or social scientists thought to ask this question. A new book complicates long-held assumptions.
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Every three months, ALBA is pleased and proud to send you this publication. We know that so many of our readers treasure it, and we value your feedback, your encouraging words as well as your constructive criticism. We strive to make the publication a forum for the exchange of information and ideas of interest...
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To the Editors: Thank you for that amazing story about that amazing photo of an amazing woman: Marina Ginestà, whose life is the stuff of legend. As it happened, I recently visited Spain, where I picked up a magazine with that photo on the cover—but it had no description of who she was. I was...
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Judith Montell, prize-winning documentary filmmaker and long-time member of the ALBA Board of Governors, passed away on May 23 after a long illness. Her best-known film was surely Forever Activists: Stories of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991. She also directed shorter films dealing with...
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José María “Chato” Galante passed away on March 29, 2020, in Madrid, Spain, due to coronavirus, following treatment for lung cancer. Chato was a lifelong activist fighting for justice for victims of Spain’s Franco dictatorship and was one of the protagonists in The Silence of Others, by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar.  
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Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu, editors. Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
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Mientras dure la guerra / While at War, dir. Amenábar; La trinchera infinita / The Endless Trench, dir. Garaño, Arregi, and Goenaga.
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Innovation and Human Rights was established in 2016 as a non-profit to provide information, supported as far as possible by documentary evidence, to enable people to discover what had happened to their relatives during the Spanish Civil War and afterward under the Franco Regime. To achieve this we are putting together an online database...
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Paul Robeson’s anti-fascist activism sought full freedom for oppressed people around the world. The singer consistently spoke against segregation and racial violence in the U.S. as well as colonialism in Africa. Anti-fascism impugns white supremacy, then and now.
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Cynthia Young recently joined ALBA’s Board of Governors.  She is the curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography.  Cynthia has also curated exhibits and published several books on Capa and other leading contemporary photographers.
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In the summer of 1937, Esther Farquhar, an Ohio Quaker recruited by American Friends Service Committee, arrived in Murcia to organize the feeding of the starving refugees. A photo diary discovered in the archives inspired the author to join humanitarian relief efforts happening today. “If they were able to do so much with so...
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I’m a collector of American left-wing protest pins. As a radical lefty lawyer, I’ve found it to be one way to be connected to the great social movements of my lifetime and before.
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Among the hundreds of thousands of Spanish refugees who ended up in French concentration camps was the graphic artist Josep Bartolí, who would later become a well-known artist in Mexico and New York. His dramatic drawings of the Civil War and life in the camps are featured in a new book by his nephew,...
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