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[[File:Abraham_Lincoln_Brigade.jpg|thumbnail|175px|left|<i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804722773/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0804722773&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=deb544037f6853d805f0f8cea67fedee The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade]</i>]]During the Spanish Civil War, approximately 2,800 American men and women answered the call from the Communist party to defend the Spanish republic from fascist aggression. These men and women served in the Fifteenth International Brigade and formed the Abraham Lincoln, Washington and MacKenzie-Papineau Battalions. These soldiers’ stories have been controversial, because 80 percent of these volunteers were Communists. Until recently, historians have not been able to fully tell the story of these men and women, but access to new archives of the American soldiers and Soviet archives have provided a much fuller picture of the story of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

===Early Books on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade===

Peter N. Carroll, in his book <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804722773/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0804722773&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=deb544037f6853d805f0f8cea67fedee The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade]</i>, stated that there had already been three generations of history written about the Lincoln Brigade by 1994. The first generation consisted of a number of first person accounts by the Brigade members. A second generation of books was written by scholars based on somewhat limited information. Carroll believes that he is part of the third generation of historians who were providing a more accurate depiction of the volunteers because he had access to a treasure trove of material from both the veterans and Soviet archives. As part of the third generation of scholars, Carroll not only tried to tell the story of veterans in Spain, he examined their broader roles in America over the past 50 years. Not surprisingly, this third generation of books has benefited greatly from the creation of archives by the Brigade veterans at Brandeis University and University of California, Berkley.<ref> Carroll, Peter N., <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804722773/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0804722773&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=deb544037f6853d805f0f8cea67fedee The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: American in the Spanish Civil War]</i>, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1994, p. vii-x.</ref>

The members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade have been the subject of a number of historical treatments, but until Carroll’s book few of these works could be classified as comprehensive and complete. There are numerous books that examine the Spanish Civil War, but most of these are general Spanish Civil War books which fail to examine the Lincoln Brigade in any detail. This is not surprising, because the Lincoln Brigade played a very small role in a complicated civil war and international conflict. While the Americans were recognized for their bravery, they were a small part of major military failure. They were part of small, poorly trained units which were severely depleted by casualties. The Lincoln Brigade did not shape the military campaigns in any dramatic fashion nor did it alter the outcome of the war. While Anthony Beevor mentions the American battalions in <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/014303765X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=014303765X&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=532d4ab27591ac134752fae66650b9ac The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939]</i>, they are not a prominent part of his book. This type of mention is not unusual in more general books on the Spanish Civil War. Therefore, historians researching and writing about the Brigade are typically not military or Spanish historians. Instead, they are Modern United States historian and have typically focused solely on the Lincoln Brigade.