(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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ALBA’s first-ever online teacher workshop, conducted over five weeks this summer, drew participants from the US, Spain, and Latin America. The topic: The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond.
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After launching ALBA's newly designed website at alba-valb.org, we are thrilled to announce further additions.
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This spring, students at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan built a website, https://scwnyc.stuy.edu, featuring Lincoln Brigade volunteers from New York City. Their history teacher, David Hanna, reports.
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As the chaos of this pandemic summer seems to foreshadow an even more eventful fall—please be sure you’re registered to vote!—we’re poised to continue our work with more determination than ever. Teaching history, inspiring activism, and upholding human rights: It’s hard to think of a time in recent memory when ALBA’s motto applied more...
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Join us on August 30 at 5pm EDT/2pm PDT for an online screening and discussion of Peter Miller’s documentary The Internationale. The film chronicles the history of the song—which was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 at the fall of the Paris Commune—from before to the end of the Cold War. It includes performances...
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Following its successful online spring gala, ALBA invites you to join a live-streamed celebration of the Lincoln Brigade Monument in San Francisco, which has been recently restored. Speakers include Isabel Allende, Bill Fletcher, Walter Hood, Susan Schwartzenberg, Rafael Jesús González, and Harvey Smith. With several musical performances. ALBA Online Monument Celebration September 12, 5pm...
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What you leave to friends and loved ones—and the causes you champion—are ways of expressing your hopes and dreams for the future and perpetuate your part in the story of the Lincoln Brigade.  As you make your plans, please consider including ALBA in your will or living trust, or naming us as a beneficiary...
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The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics: Playing as if the World Were Watching, by James Stout. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020.
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Down Below, by Leonora Carrington.  Translated by Victor Llona, with an introduction by Marina Warner. New York: NYRB, 2017.
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Recognition of the presence of Spanish Loyalists in the French Army over the last 15 years has unfortunately led to the propagation of numerous myths.
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On returning to Canada from the Spanish Civil War, Jim Higgins was branded a communist, hounded by the RCMP, and welcomed by his Lincoln Battalion comrades when he sought refuge in New York. In his soon-to-be-published book, he writes, “It rained like hell but I was very happy.”
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Jack Mayerhofer is the newest member of the ALBA Board of Governors and its freshest face.  A leading figure in the protection human rights and the development of education programs to prevent mass atrocities across the globe, Jack holds a B.S. in French and Applied Linguistics from Penn State University and an M.S. in...
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Lollie Butler is a Fellow in Literature, granted by the Arizona Commission for the Arts.
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What Lincoln vet Len Olson taught his daughter Hannah. “Think of all the work that was done to this thing by someone’s hands.”
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Two months ago, our New York office received a unique gift from David Geltman of Boston. Geltman is the grandson of Israel Perlman, who was a New York City bookseller. In February 1939, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) organized a fundraiser auction for anti-Nazi writers and the VALB Rehabilitation Fund. Sponsors...
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ALBA’s website at alba-valb.org has been redesigned from the ground up. The searchable online database of volunteers who left for Spain from the United States will be updated over the summer, along with a broad range of content for teachers and the general public. Check back in regularly! The online edition of The Volunteer...
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Due to the COVID-19 crisis, ALBA’s in-person institutes are being postponed until further notice. Instead, we will be offering a fully online workshop from June 30 through July 28 with our partners at the Collaborative for Educational Services in Northampton, MA. Titled “America and World Fascism: From the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and...
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“Why should one care about events taking place far away?” This is one of the “essential questions” that drive our work with teachers around the country. Together with the question “When do you stand up for what you believe in?” it captures the spirit of the internationalist commitment that drove the almost 40,000 volunteers...
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We speak with one of the No More Deaths volunteers who faced trial for helping save migrants’ lives. In August 2017, Madeline Huse and three other volunteers of the Tucson-based organization No More Deaths entered the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona to deposit jugs of water and cans of beans near various...
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Defying the devastating Covid-19 crisis, this past May 17 ALBA’s annual reunion and ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony—celebrated fully online (Facebook | YouTube)—brought together viewers from around the world. Hosted by ALBA’s María Hernández-Ojeda and Sebastiaan Faber, the celebration featured speeches by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Neal Rosenstein, ALBA’s executive director Mark Wallem, and ALBA governors...
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