Relevant literature and archival sources are listed at the end of each narrative.
Photo credits are listed within each page. Please contact us if there are any unintended errors within photo credits.
Books
To familiarize ourselves with the broader contours of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, this select list of books was particularly helpful:
- Giles Tremlett, 2020. The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom, and the Spanish Civil War. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Peter N. Carroll. 1994. The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Adam Hochschild. 2016. Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Boston: Mariner Books.
- Gerben Zaagsma. 2017. Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Danny Duncan Collum, ed. 1992. African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do.” New York: G.K.Hall & Co./ Maxwell Macmillan International.
Archives
To research the particulars of the men’s lives, this project relied mainly on the following archival sources:
- The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) at New York University libraries:
The ALBA archives at the Tamiment Library & Wagner Labor Archives (New York University) provided access to several photographs of volunteers who signed the fan. Through their website we were also able to consult the transcript of an oral history interview with one of the volunteers in our group.
The ALBA website contains a Volunteer Database with biographical information and photographs related to the Americans in the International Brigades. There we found primary information on almost all the American volunteers who signed the fan.
The ALBA website also includes old and current issues of The Volunteer. There we found articles that mentioned some of the men who signed the fan and shed light on various aspects of their experience in Spain, particularly their repatriation and internment in French camps.
- The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow:
Records for the International Brigades are in the “Comintern Archives, Fond 545.” Within that group, Opis (inventory) 6 includes the personal records of the volunteers. Among these records we found the Personnel files and repatriation forms for most of the volunteers who signed the fan. If the volunteers applied to join the Communist Party of Spain, a personal biography (Biografía de Militantes) would also be part of their file. Together these documents provided information about the volunteers’ political affiliation, their self-reported biographical notes, and their experience in Spain. The Repatriation Files also contained evaluations of the volunteer’s character and performance while in Spain as they waited to return to their home countries in late 1938.
- Other sources include:
- Ancestry.com, which provides digital records of personal information, including census records, birth, marriage, and death certificates, military draft cards, and ship manifests.
- Newspapers.com, a website with digitized copies of local newspapers spanning several decades. It is helpful for contemporaneous reports on labor strikes and other political events that involved American volunteers. These newspapers often include obituaries.
- Findagrave.com assists in locating burial sites. This source sometimes provides details about American volunteers that do not completely match other archival records.
Research Challenges
Due to the International Brigades’ political ties to communism and the illegality of Americans fighting in Spain, archival records can be fragmented and misleading. Many volunteers used aliases that make it difficult to connect them to their legal names. Typically, the men who joined the International Brigades were young and had not started their own families, which can make it difficult to determine when and how they moved from place to place. War conditions themselves impacted how records were kept and preserved. Finally, the history of the Spanish Civil War remains a contested and unresolved legacy in Spain today, affecting the writing of history and open conversations about the role of the international volunteers.