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'Nobody knows how much I owe that man', Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. 'I could never repay him'. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate conditions, risked his own life to smuggle part of his own soup ration to Levi, quietly leaving the mess tin by a half-constructed brick wall. Without those extra five hundred calories, Levi could not have survived, and would probably not have written If This Is a Man, the first published account by a Holocaust survivor. In A Man of Few Words, Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer from the Piedmontese town of Fossano,...
According to legend the Constantinian Order is the oldest chivalric institution, founded by Emperor Constantine the Great and governed by successive Byzantine Emperors and their descendants. While this chronology was supported by multiple writers even into the twentieth century, it has little historical basis. Nonetheless, the Angeli, Farnese and Bourbon families which held the Grand Mastership could legitimately claim Byzantine imperial descent, albeit in the female line, and the Order’s cross replicates that seen by Constantine in the vision recorded by both Lactantius and Eusebius, writing very soon after Maximian’s defeat at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Order’s emergence i...
As the Holocaust passes out of living memory, future generations will no longer come face-to-face with Holocaust survivors. But the lessons of that terrible period in history are too important to let slip past. How Was It Possible?, edited and introduced by Peter Hayes, provides teachers and students with a comprehensive resource about the Nazi persecution of Jews. Deliberately resisting the reflexive urge to dismiss the topic as too horrible to be understood intellectually or emotionally, the anthology sets out to provide answers to questions that may otherwise defy comprehension. This anthology is organized around key issues of the Holocaust, from the historical context for antisemitism to...
For sixty years, different groups in Europe have put forth interpretations of World War II and their respective countries’ roles in it consistent with their own political and psychological needs. The conflict over the past has played out in diverse arenas, including film, memoirs, court cases, and textbooks. It has had profound implications for democratization and relations between neighboring countries. This collection provides a comparative case study of how memories of World War II have been constructed and revised in seven European nations: France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and the USSR (Russia). The contributors include scholars of history, literature, political sc...
While the historical significance of fascism and anti-fascism is still being hotly debated in Europe and around the world, this anthology offers a new look at the many faces of repression and resistance. Stanislao G. Pugliese brings together a wide range of voices that illuminate more than eighty years of fascism and anti-fascism in Italy. Many of the pieces, including letters from women to Mussolini and anti-fascist graffiti from a Nazi prison in Rome, are available in English for the first time. The selections include historical documents, political analysis, stories, songs, and memoirs from a variety of perspectives. Taken together, the documents provide a compelling account of the political, historical, economic, and social impact of fascism and the resistance. Touching on fields as far ranging as political science, history, women's studies, and religion, Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Resistance in Italy is immediate, human, and eminently readable.
The fascinating story of a century-old automobile dynasty Fiat is one of the world's largest automakers, but when it made headlines by grabbing control of a bankrupt Chrysler in 2009 it was unknown in the U.S. Fiat’s against-all-odds swoop on Chrysler---masterminded by Sergio Marchionne, the Houdini-like manager who saved Fiat from its own near-collapse in 2005 – has made the automaker one of the most unlikely winners of the financial crisis. Mondo Agnelli is a new book that looks at the chain of unpredictable events triggered by the death of Gianni Agnelli in 2003. Gianni, the charismatic, silver-haired power broker and style icon, was the patriarch who had lead the company founded by h...
In recent years scholars and researchers have turned their attention to the attitudes of ordinary men [and women]A during the period of the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. This comprehensive work addresses the disturbing question of how people reacted when their neighbours were ostracized, humiliated, deported and later murdered.
Home after Fascism draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. The book reveals Jews' complex and often changing feelings toward their former homes and highlights the ways in which three distinct national contexts—East German, West German, and Italian—shaped their answers to the question, is this home? Returning Italian and German Jews renegotiated their place in national communities that had targeted them for persecution and extermination. While most Italian Jews remained deeply attached to their home country, German Jews struggled to feel at h...
Discusses the role the Holocaust came to play in French and Italian political culture in the period after the end of the Cold War by charting the development of official, national Holocaust commemorations in France and Italy
“This well-crafted biography” presents “a balanced, but not uncritical, examination of the life of a controversial pope” (Library Journal). Debates over the legacy of Pope Pius XII are so heated they are known as the “Pius wars.” Soldier of Christ focuses instead on Eugenio Pacelli, the flawed yet gifted man himself. While offering insight into the pope’s response to Nazism, Robert A. Ventresca argues that it was the Cold War and Pius XII’s manner of engaging with the modern world that defined his pontificate. Ventresca begins with the story of Pacelli’s Roman upbringing, his intellectual formation in Rome’s seminaries, and his interwar experience as papal diplomat and Va...