ALBA ONLINE EVENTS DRAW THOUSANDS

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 included appearances by the celebrated Chilean novelist Isabel Allende (whose speech you can read in this issue), labor activist Bill Fletcher, architect Walter Hood, poet Rafael Jesús González, and musical performances by Velina Brown and Dave Rovics. Linda Lustig and Martha Jarocki, members of the original monument committee, explained how the project came about, while Susan Schwartzenberg, Catherine Powell, and Brian McWilliams recalled

WHAT’S NEW AT THE TAMIMENT

By Michael Koncewicz

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. Prior to NYU, she served as the History Librarian and Director of Archives and Special Collections at Barnard College and as an archivist at the Los Angeles Public Library and the Atlantic City Free Public Library. She holds a BA from NYU and an MLIS from UCLA. Shannon's professional and scholarly interests include community-based archiving, underrepresented voices and marginalized histories in archives, and the use of primary resource materials in education. She recently celebrated her first anniversary and Tamiment and is eager to work with ALBA on continuing to promote our collections through classes, events, and educational outreach.

Earlier this year, Tamiment and our colleagues at the Library’s Archival Collections Management department published the public finding aid for the Mosess (Moe) Fishman Papers. Researchers can view the finding aid here: http://dlib.nyu.edu/ findingaids/html/tamwag/alba_224/scopecontent.html Due to new guidance from the University regarding the reopening of buildings on campus, we are not able to schedule any in-person appointments for external researchers at this time. For those who wanted limited access to our collections, our staff has recently returned to work onsite in a staggered schedule and we are now able to provide remote reference on your behalf. In order to begin assisting you, please create an Aeon account by visiting https://aeon.library.nyu.edu/logon. Please reply to let us know when your account is created and then a member of the Special Collections team will contact you to begin processing your inquiry. Please note that there is a substantial backlog, but our colleagues are doing their best to work through all of the requests. the rich history of Bay Area labor activism. Luis Osuna, an immigration activist from San Diego, spoke compellingly on behalf of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. The video of the event can be viewed on ALBA’s website and YouTube channel.

On August 30, ALBA presented another in its online series of film screenings, featuring The Internationale, an awardwinning documentar y by ALBA board member and filmmaker Peter Miller. The event included a lively panel discussion and Q&A session with the filmmaker, scholar and ALBA honorar y board member Robin D.G. Kelley, and musician Holly Near, moderated by ALBA’s Peter Glazer. (To view the panel discussion, go to ALBA’s YouTube channel.)

Next up in the ALBA film series are two documentaries: Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War, by board member Julia Newman (November 15), and, in Februar y, Invisible Heroes: African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Visit ALBA’s website at alba-valb.org for more details.

Feel free to email us at tamiment.wagner@nyu.edu if you have any questions about our collections or if you would like to schedule a virtual class for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Michael Koncewicz is the Michael Nash Research Scholar/ Archivist and Ewen Center Coordinator at NYU.

SPAIN’S CABINET APPROVES PROPOSAL FOR NEW MEMORY L AW

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 of state violence and theft; annul judicial sentences from sham courts designed to eliminate Franco’s political dissidents; reform the history curriculum in public education; limit freedom of speech for anti-democratic ideologies; and remove or prohibit public tributes to the dictatorship. (In October, the Spanish far-right Vox and center-right Partido Popular attempted to leverage the 2007 law in order to remove a plaque in Madrid dedicated to Francisco Largo Caballero, who served as Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic during the war.) Although details remain vague, the consequences of the law could be far-reaching. In addition to acknowledging that the state is responsible for locating and exhuming the tens of thousands of mass graves dating from the civil war and the dictatorship—a task that, until now, has been undertaken by families and volunteers—the law calls for an inventory of illicit transfers of property and wealth during the years of the Franco regime. It also seeks to issue some reparation to the thousands of Spaniards whose paid “penitence” for their political “sins” in forced-labor camps. (SF)