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As president of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce was one of the most influential intellectuals involved in Italian public affairs after the fall of Mussolini. Placing Croce at the centre of historical events between 1943 and 1952, this book details his participation in Italy's political life, and his major contributions to the rebirth of Italian democracy. Drawing on a great amount of primary material, including Croce's political speeches, correspondences, diaries, and official documents from post-war Italy, this book illuminates the dynamic and progressive nature of Croce's liberalism and the shortcomings of the old Liberal leaders. Providing a year-by-year account of Croce's initiatives, author Fabio Fernando Rizi fills the gap in Croce's biography, covering aspects of his public life often neglected, misinterpreted, or altogether ignored, and restores his standing among the founding fathers of modern Italy.
“The best book about America’s first modern secret service.” --Washington Post Book World In the months before World War II, FDR prepared the country for conflict with Germany and Japan by reshuffling various government agencies to create the Office of Strategic Services--America’s first intelligence agency and the direct precursor to the CIA. When he charged William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, a successful Wall Street lawyer and Wilkie Republican, to head up the office, the die was set for some of the most fantastic and fascinating operations the U.S. government has ever conducted. Author Richard Harris Smith, himself an ex-CIA hand, documents the controversial agency from its concep...
These volumes of the Documentary History of the Jews in Italy", illustrate the history of the Jews in Genoa and surroundings from Antiquity to the French Revolution. The earliest documentary evidence takes the form of letters from King Theodoric. For the Middle Ages the documentation is relatively fragmentary and sporadic. Later there is greater abundance of historical evidence, which portrays chiefly the destinies of the Jews in the Republic from the sixteenth century on, when the presence of the Jews became permanent and a regular community was established also in the capital.The historical records presented illustrate mainly the relationship between the government of the Genoese Republic ...
First Published in 1987 The Yezidis: A Study in Survival traces the origin of Yezidi community’s religion, describes the discovery of the people by Western travellers in the early nineteenth century and details the Yezidi community’s traumatic history and their status in the 80s. The Yezidi religious group is spread out over Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and erstwhile USSR and have retained their identity for over 500 years. The Yezidi’s believe that Lucifer, the fallen angel, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as chief angel: their history is, like their faith, characterized by dignity and survival in the face of great odds. Chapters also cover Sultan Abdul Hamid’s cruel but vain efforts to force the Yezidis to embrace Islam, leading to the emergence of Mayan Khatun, a strong-willed Yezidi princess who ruled the community from 1913-1958. They include vivid account of her rivalry with her brother Ismail and the ill-fated marriage between her son and his daughter. The final chapter describes the community in Soviet Armenia and Georgia. This book is a must read for students of Middle East studies and Middle East history.
First published in 1993. The Yezidis are a community of around 200,000 Kurds who possess their own religion, quite distinct from Islam, which most other Kurds profess, and from the Christian and Jewish faiths. The Yezidis live in the northern parts of Iraq and Syria, in eastern Turkey, in Germany and in the ex-Soviet republics of Armenia and Georgia. (In Armenia the Yezidis, long classified as Kurds, are now recognized as a separate minority group and the term 'Kurd' is applied only to Moslem Kurds.) This book stems from a conversation with the Yezidi priest of the village who remarked that now the children were learning to read and write they were asking him questions about the Yezidi scriptures and the history of the community. Lacking any written material, he could only repeat to them the oral traditions he had himself learned as a child.
Italy's War of Liberation takes issue with the apparently prevalent attitude among Allied commanders during World War II that the Italian military was ineffective. O'Reilly recounts the little-known story of the significant contribution made by the Italian military during the Italian Campaign, including the contribution of relatively unacknowledged Italian Partisan formations that fought in Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Despite the fact that Italians fought on the front lines with the British and American soldiers, and despite the service of the Italian Navy and Air Force, the Allies refused repeated Italian pleas for more involvement in combat. This book not only attempts to correct the record of military history by illustrating the ways in which the Italians were underutilized by the Allies, but it also serves to paint a fair portrait of the Italian military's substantial efforts to defeat Hitler and eradicate Fascism.
An unwilling, desperate nun trapped in the cloister, unable to gain release: such is the image that endures today of monastic life in early modern Europe. In By Force and Fear, Anne Jacobson Schutte demonstrates that this and other common stereotypes of involuntary consignment to religious houses—shaped by literary sources such as Manzoni’s The Betrothed—are badly off the mark. Drawing on records of the Congregation of the Council, held in the Vatican Archive, Schutte examines nearly one thousand petitions for annulment of monastic vows submitted to the Pope and adjudicated by the Council during a 125-year period, from 1668 to 1793. She considers petitions from Roman Catholic regions a...
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