Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Italy

Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, similarly obsessed with achieving modernity and with joining the ranks of the great powers, have traveled parallel courses with very different national identities. In this audacious book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan.

Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the...

Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy represents a departure from previous studies, both in its focus on demand and in its emphasis on the history of the material culture of the West. By demonstrating that the roots of modern consumer society can be found in Renaissance Italy, Richard Goldthwaite offers a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the history of modern consumerism--a movement which he regards as a positive force for the formation of new attitudes about things that is a defining characteristic of modern culture.

Among the most dramatic problems faced on the Italian peninsula in the fourteenth century were the raids of marauding mercenary companies. These companies, known locally as Companies of Adventure and more generally as Free Companies, were private armies, composed of professional soldiers and adventurers from throughout Europe. They sold their services to the highest bidder in times of war, and staged ruinous raids in times of peace. The city of Siena, visually opulent and wedged between Florence and the lands of the pope--two frequent employers of mercenaries--was an especial target....

Nobles were slaughtered and their castles looted or destroyed, bodies were dismembered and corpses fed to animals--the Udine carnival massacre of 1511 was the most extensive and damaging popular revolt in Renaissance Italy (and the basis for the story of Romeo and Juliet). Mad Blood Stirring is a gripping account and analysis of this event, as well as the social structures and historical conflicts preceding it and the subtle shifts in the mentality of revenge it introduced.

This new reader's edition offers students and general readers an abridged version of this classic...

Perhaps more than in any other city, Venice has been shaped by its environment. The lagoon on which it was built isolated the city's inhabitants from mainland Europe, forcing them to look seaward for their survival and to establish a maritime empire that generated incalculable wealth, making Venice the envy of Renaissance Europe. In Venice Triumphant, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan provides a rich, multilayered history of Venice from Roman times to the sixteenth century. Instead of employing a rigidly chronological framework, she looks at the history of Venice thematically, focusing on the...

The intellectual heritage of the Italian Renaissance rivals that of any period in human history. Yet even as the social, political, and economic history of Renaissance Italy inspires exciting and innovative scholarship, the study of its intellectual history has grown less appealing, and our understanding of its substance and significance remains largely defined by the work of nineteenth-century thinkers. In The Lost Italian Renaissance, historian and literary scholar Christopher Celenza argues that serious interest in the intellectual life of Renaissance Italy can be...

Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country. The continuities between the culture of the fascist and post-fascist periods were, however, far greater than what intellectuals were ready to admit, creating an uncomfortable, sometimes schizophrenic relation to time, as a painful urge to erase the past.

Drawing on a variety of critical approaches,...

Scholars in the United States have long defined the Italian immigrant woman as silent and submissive; a woman who stays 'in the shadows'. In this transnational analysis of women and gender in Italy's world-wide migration, Franca Iacovetta and Donna Gabaccia use international and internationalist perspectives, feminist labour history, women's history, and Italian migration history to provide a woman-centred, gendered analysis of Italian workers, and by so doing, challenge this stereotype.

Comparing the lives of women in Italy, Belgium, the USA, Canada, Argentina, and Australia,...

The transnational migrations of the early twentieth century had a profound impact on the lives of many people, but none more so than those who were left behind. In this lively interdisciplinary study, Linda Reeder examines the lives of rural Sicilian women and the changes that took place as a result of male migration to the United States.

Tracing the changing notions of female and male in rural Sicily, Reeder uses a wide variety of primary sources, including birth and death records, government records, novels, and newspapers, to explore the impact of industrialization on motherhood,...

As the Second World War drew to a close, European borders were being redrawn. The regions of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, nominally Italian but at various times also belonging to Austria and Germany, fell under the rule of Yugoslavia and its dictator Marshal Tito. The ensuing removal and genocide of Italians from these regions had been little explored or even discussed until 1999, when the esteemed Italian journalist Arrigo Petacco wrote L'esodo: La tragedia negata degli italiani d'Istria, Dalmazia e Venezia Giulia. Now this story is available in English as A Tragedy...

The social historian, searching for the basis of a culture, often turns to a study of ordinary people. Perhaps one of the most revealing places to find them is in a court of law. In this presentatoin of nine criminal trials of sixteenth-century Rome (1540-75), where magistrates kept verbatim records, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen paint a lively portrait of a society, one that is reminiscent of Boccaccio. These stories, however, are true.

Each trial transcript is followed by an essay that interprets the beliefs, codes, everyday speech, and personal transactions of a world that is...