News from ALBA

ONLINE SCREENING OF

INTERNATIONALE THE

Join us on August 30 (time TBA) 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 and interviews with musicians and activists from around the world, including Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger.

CELEBRATION OF THE SAN FRANCISCO MONUMENT

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 various musical performances.

ALBA Online Monument Celebration September 12, 5pm EDT/2pm PDT More information at www.alba-valb.org

Due to the pandemic restrictions, there will be no physical gathering at the monument.

ALBA WEBSITE UPDATES

Volunteer Database

In August, ALBA’s data team completed the migration of the volunteer database to the new website. As part of this effort, the team also performed an initial update and loaded and completed quality checks on over 2,700 individual records. The team—Chris Brooks, Dennis Meaney, Elizabeth Yearsley, and Jeff Barckert—collectively put in more than 300 hours to complete the task.

The volunteers’ data is intended to provide information about the lives of Americans who volunteered to serve in the Republican armed forces and ancillary services during the Spanish Civil War. The objective is to provide both an overview of their service and a list of sources. The records are aimed at historians, educators, students and the family members of the volunteers.

The database is an ongoing project. Near-term enhancements include: • Additional records from the Russian State Archive of SocioPolitical History (RGASPI). • Passport information and photographs from ALBA’s passport project. • Family background information from Ancestry.com. • Links to oral histories posted online by NYU and other entities.

Event Videos

As COVID-19 has forced many of our in-person events online, we have begun to record them for later viewing. Visitors to the home page of our new site will notice that a recording of our Special Online Gala

Event is available for viewing. We hope to continue to add event vid

eos from future programs as well as adding older footage from ALBA’s storied past to our place online.

Featured Tamiment Collections

Updating our webpage gave us the opportunity to showcase our incredible partnership with NYU’s Tamiment Library. We have created a centralized page where visitors to our website can navigate to our ALBA collections at Tamiment which include the Harry Randall Collection, the Manny Harriman Video Oral History Collection, the John Gerassi Oral History Collection, the Arthur H. Landis Oral History Collection, and the Francis Patai Audio Collection . Visitors can also access the link to Tamiment’s entire digital collection, filled with incredible labor and radical histories.

Monument Page

In celebration of our new webpage and the completion of repairs to our San Francisco Monument, we have created a dedicated space online for this great memorial to the men and women of the Lincoln Brigade. The page features various images and press on the monument, directions on how to get to the monument at Embarcadero Plaza, as well as text and video of a moving speech giving by ALBA Board Member Peter Glazer given at the original dedication ceremony in 2008.

Invisible Heroes

To highlight the African American participation in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade we have created a special spotlight page for the documentary

Invisible Heroes

. Documentarians Alfonso Domingo & Jordi Torrent produced this particular film to highlight the African American contribution to the ALB, their fight for democracy, and fight for the civil rights that were denied to them in their own country. Visitors will be able to view the film’s trailer, several reviews of the film, and can contact ALBA if they wish to purchase it for themselves.