Almost eighty years after he disappeared, Ascención Mendieta could finally give a proper burial to her father, murdered by the Franco regime.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Almost eighty years after he disappeared, Ascención Mendieta could finally give a proper burial to her father, murdered by the Franco regime.
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By Gloria Leticia Diaz, via FNS News: Anais Huerta says she would really like to know what happened to her great uncle. Felix Llorente Gutierrez was 27 years old when he was detained by followers of General Francisco Franco in Medina del Campo, Spain, on July 28, 1936. Less than one month later, on...
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Cultural anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz has spent the last 13 years of his life studying the impact of Civil War exhumations in Spain, working in close collaboration with groups like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Thanks to their efforts, Spanish citizens have exhumed more than 6,000 bodies since 2000—most of them civilian...
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Emilio Silva, founding president of Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, was in New York to receive the fifth ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Spain’s transition to democracy, he said, failed to address the country’s moral debt to the thousands of victims of violence during the Spanish Civil War and the...
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The threads of the past are woven into the fabric of the present. That is what we mean when we talk about the Lincoln Brigade as a legacy: we acknowledge that the lives of the volunteers, and the values that drove them, continue to be important today. A legacy is a gift, but it...
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ALBA is proud to announce the winner of the 2015 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism--the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. (Tickets | Press Release | Comunicado de prensa.) Founded by journalist Emilio Silva in 2000, the Association has...
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The doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction allows tribunals from any State to prosecute heinous crimes that are an affront to all humanity. It is our most important weapon in the battle against the great criminals of history. Yet the United States is dragging its feet.
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Shoot the Messenger? Spanish Democracy and the Crimes of Francoism: From the Pact of Silence to the Trial of Baltasar Garzón. By Francisco Espinosa Maestre. Translated by Richard Barker. (East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2013).
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Bryan Stevenson, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, will accept the fourth ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism award at ALBA’s annual event in New York on April 27.
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On November 6, the Spanish delegation to the United Nations said that it would not review the 1977 law which gave amnesty for political crimes committed during the civil war and General Francisco Franco's dictatorship. According to Baltasar Garzon, at least 152,000 civilians living in territory controlled by Franco's Nationalist forces disappeared between...
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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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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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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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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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