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The Istrian Peninsula, which is made up of modern-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy suffered from the so-called "Istrian exodus" after the Second World War. This book looks at this difficult, silenced past and shifts the usual focus from migrants to those who stayed behind and to the new immigrants who came to the “emptied” towns.The research, based on individual memories, deals with silences and competing national discourses, reasons to stay and leave, hybrid border ethnic identities, and the renewal of Istrian society and its new social relations. It is a self-critical reflection on an ignored chapter of national history, which, with an empathetic approach, allows the silence to speak.
Central to the aim of both this book is to rethink the concept of diaspora as it is used both academically and popularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It seeks to interrogate the notion of “diaspora” in an interdisciplinary way, and to explore the contradictions inherent in contemporary notions of place and identity. It presents explorations of both “traditional” diasporas, such as the Irish community in the United States and in Great Britain, as well as recently established diasporas being formed through new patterns of migration and resettlement. Traditional conceptions of diaspora focused on forced exile from the homeland and the adoption of conscious strategies of...
Is it right for historians to serve as 'expert witnesses' to past events? Since the end of the Cold War, a series of heated and politicised debates across Europe have questioned the 'truth' about painful episodes in the twentieth century. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica, inquiries and fact-finding commissions have become a common device employed by governments to deal with the pressure of public opinion. State-sponsored programmes of education and research attempt to encourage a common moral understanding of the lessons we learn from these painful memories. Contemporary historians have increasingly been drawn into these efforts since 1989 – in the courtroom, in the media, on commissions, as advisers. In a series of thoughtful essays, written by leading historians from across Europe, this volume considers the ethics and responsibilities that this new role entails. For anyone concerned with the role of the historian in contemporary society and how we arrive at a public understanding of history, this book is essential reading.
Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentiou...
This book scrutinizes the events of 1919 from below: the global underside of the Wilsonian moment. During 1919 the Great Powers redrew the map of the world with the Treaties of Paris and established the League of Nations intending to prevent future war. Yet what is often missed is that 1919 was a complex threshold between war and peace contested on a global scale. This process began prior to war's end with mutinies, labour and consumer unrest, colonial revolt but reached a high point in 1919. Most obviously, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 continued into 1919 which signalled a decisive year for the Bolshevik regime. While the leaders of the Great Powers famously drew up new states in their P...
Recasting the birth of fascism, nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I, Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise of the nation. The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many lo...
This study presents a comprehensive, balanced and factually grounded narrative of the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations as a historic event that has been the subject of much distortion in the historiographical traditions of nationalist lore in Greece and Turkey, as well as in scholarly publications of various sorts elsewhere over the span of the past eighty years. Diplomacy and Displacement contributes to the general literature on the Exchange by incorporating into the broader picture the Turkish dimension of the event, particularly the Turkish side of the decision-making process, and the episode of the Muslim refugees that have been left outside the scope of the research agenda, thereby, breaking up the established notion of the Exchange skewed towards the Greek side. It thus sheds doubt on the success paradigm attributed to this event. By adopting a people-centered approach to the Lausanne Treaty and its consequences, the book offers a critique of official versions of the story and encourages people to consider policy decisions together with their huge and often devastating implications for the lives of ordinary people.
Based on previously unavailable archival documents and oral accounts from people who were there, Petacco reveals the events and exposes the Italian government's mishandling - and then official silence on - the situation.
This edited collection offers the first systematic account in English of Italy’s international position from Caporetto – a major turning-point in Italy’s participation in the First World War – to the end of the liberal regime in Italy in 1922. It shows that after the ‘Great War’, not only did Italy establish itself as a regional power but also achieved its post-unification ambition to be recognised, at least from a formal viewpoint, as a great power. This subject is addressed through multiple perspectives, covering Italy’s relations and mutual perceptions vis-à-vis the Allies, the vanquished nations, and the ‘New Europe’. Fourteen contributions by leading historians reappraise Italy’s role in the construction of the post-war international order, drawing on extensive multi-archival and multi-national research, combining for the first time documents from American, Austrian, British, French, German, Italian, Russian and former Yugoslav archives.
The Italian Empire and the Great War brings an imperial and colonial perspective to the Italian experience of the First World War. Italy's decision for war in 1915 built directly on Italian imperial ambitions from the late nineteenth century onwards, and its conquest of Libya in 1911DS12. The Italian empire was conceived both as a system of overseas colonies under Italian sovereignty, and as an informal global empire of emigrants; both were mobilized to support the war in 1915DS18. The war was designed to bring about 'a greater Italy' both literally and metaphorically. In pursuit of global status, Italy fought a global war, sending troops to the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East, though w...