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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade: the Historiography of the American soldiers in the Spanish American War
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In 1987, Alvah Bessie and Albert Pargo edited a collection of writings by veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that gathered a number of these earlier writings and consolidated them into one volume.<ref> Bessie, Alvah and Albert Pargo, eds., <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0853457247/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0853457247&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=95a011af1ec117470282c71b4c0f440c Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Spain 1936 -1939]</i>, Monthly Review Press (New York) 1987.</ref> This volume demonstrated the diversity of material written by the American veterans. The volume includes poems, interviews and excerpts from scholarly works. Pargo and Bessie have selected writings that try to walk the reader through various aspects of the Spanish Civil War. One of the highlights of the book is an interview conducted by Studs Terkel of Irving Goff. Goff was a guerilla warfare specialist in Spain. Terkel interviewed Goff about his experiences during World War II with OSS as guerrilla warfare specialist in Africa and Italy.
After the first person accounts of the Lincoln Brigade were published, a number of historians began writing books about the Lincoln Brigade and their role in Spanish Civil War. Oddly enough, perhaps the most comprehensive account of the Lincoln Brigade during this second generation of books was drafted by Arthur Landis, an American veteran of the Spanish Civil War, entitled The Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Unfortunately, these histories suffer from a number of problems. While Landis’ work is the most comprehensive, it is also potentially the most biased. The other books relied on incomplete information for their conclusions. Additionally, a number of the American veterans during 1950s and 1960s were also discouraged from talking openly about the experiences because they were concerned about being labeled communists.
===The Second Generation of Books===
