History of the Collection
In the 1930s, Oberlin College was home to a large number of left-leaning, pacifist, and anti-fascist students and faculty. Many people were intensely interested in the conflict in Spain.
In the summer of 1937, Spanish Department professor Paul Rogers traveled to Republican Spain as part of an international delegation. One of the people he met there was the American poet Langston Hughes who had also lived in Oberlin in 1934. In 1938, Oberlin College sophomore Paul MacEachron was killed in action fighting as a volunteer in the Republican cause.
In 2025 Oberlin Professor of Hispanic Studies Sebastiaan Faber offered Special Collections a series of microfilms that were made of the personnel files of the American volunteers that fought in the Spanish Civil War, derived from the original archive is in Moscow. These microfilms were made shortly after the USSR was opened up. One copy is held at the ALBA collection (Tamiment, Special Collections, NYU), the other belonged to the historian Peter Carroll, who died a year ago. He gave Faber his copy. Many of these files are intermittently available in scanned form online, but the Russian archive, RGASPI, has an unreliable internet presence.