Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy

Download Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674028241
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (282 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy by : Daniela Rossini

Download or read book Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy written by Daniela Rossini and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1918, Wilson's image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread through Italy, filling an ideological void. Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation in the context of the countries' cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy.

Manipulating the Masses

Download Manipulating the Masses PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807174173
Total Pages : 656 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Manipulating the Masses by : John Maxwell Hamilton

Download or read book Manipulating the Masses written by John Maxwell Hamilton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize by the Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy Manipulating the Masses tells the story of the enduring threat to American democracy that arose out of World War I: the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. During the Great War, the federal government exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of American citizens. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), established by President Woodrow Wilson one week after the United States entered the war in April 1917. Driven by its fiery chief, George Creel, the CPI reached every crevice of the nation, every day, and extended widely abroad. It established the first national newspaper, made prepackaged news a quotidian aspect of governing, and pioneered the concept of public diplomacy. It spread the Wilson administration’s messages through articles, cartoons, books, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines; through feature films and volunteer Four Minute Men who spoke during intermission; through posters plastered on buildings and along highways; and through pamphlets distributed by the millions. It enlisted the nation’s leading progressive journalists, advertising executives, and artists. It harnessed American universities and their professors to create propaganda and add legitimacy to its mission. Even as Creel insisted that the CPI was a conduit for reliable, fact-based information, the office regularly sanitized news, distorted facts, and played on emotions. Creel extolled transparency but established front organizations. Overseas, the CPI secretly subsidized news organs and bribed journalists. At home, it challenged the loyalty of those who occasionally questioned its tactics. Working closely with federal intelligence agencies eager to sniff out subversives and stifle dissent, the CPI was an accomplice to the Wilson administration’s trampling of civil liberties. Until now, the full story of the CPI has never been told. John Maxwell Hamilton consulted over 150 archival collections in the United States and Europe to write this revealing history, which shows the shortcuts to open, honest debate that even well-meaning propagandists take to bend others to their views. Every element of contemporary government propaganda has antecedents in the CPI. It is the ideal vehicle for understanding the rise of propaganda, its methods of operation, and the threat it poses to democracy.

America in Italian Culture

Download America in Italian Culture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019884946X
Total Pages : 575 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis America in Italian Culture by : Guido Bonsaver

Download or read book America in Italian Culture written by Guido Bonsaver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.

The Mediatization of War and Peace

Download The Mediatization of War and Peace PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110707373
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Mediatization of War and Peace by : Christoph Cornelissen

Download or read book The Mediatization of War and Peace written by Christoph Cornelissen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born “theater of imagery”, the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war’s end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.

Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922

Download Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030500934
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922 by : Antonio Varsori

Download or read book Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922 written by Antonio Varsori and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations

Download The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521763282
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (217 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations by : William Earl Weeks

Download or read book The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations written by William Earl Weeks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume of the updated edition describes how the United States became a global power during the period from 1913 to 1945.

On the Edge of Democracy

Download On the Edge of Democracy PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192549588
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis On the Edge of Democracy by : Rosario Forlenza

Download or read book On the Edge of Democracy written by Rosario Forlenza and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Edge of Democracy examines the emergence of democracy in Italy in the wake of World War Two. It examines the nature of the democracy forged in the liminal period after Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Fascism, was removed from government in the summer of 1943. Instead of pouring through institutional accounts, which root the origins of democracy in the establishment of parties and in electoral outcomes, Forlenza focuses on the lived experiences of ordinary people and elites in extraordinary times. Meanings of democracy are not variations of a universal model but emerge as contingent interpretative acts and a symbolization following political and existential crisis under condition of violence and war. On the Edge of Democracy captures a series of key events which saw people torn between going home or staying at the front, between clinging to a disrespected but habitual monarchy or engaging with a republican experiment. Becoming a democracy was also a kind of politically spiritual act: the power of the myth of America and the struggle for order as a function of the cosmic fight between communism and ant-communism in the incipient Cold War had a formative power on the origins, meanings, and characters of post-fascist democracy in Italy.

Making the World Safe

Download Making the World Safe PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199990085
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (999 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Making the World Safe by : Julia F. Irwin

Download or read book Making the World Safe written by Julia F. Irwin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making the World Safe, historian Julia Irwin offers an insightful account of the American Red Cross, from its founding in 1881 by Clara Barton to its rise as the government's official voluntary aid agency. Equally important, Irwin shows that the story of the Red Cross is simultaneously a story of how Americans first began to see foreign aid as a key element in their relations with the world. As the American Century dawned, more and more Americans saw the need to engage in world affairs and to make the world a safer place--not by military action but through humanitarian aid. It was a time perfectly suited for the rise of the ARC. Irwin shows how the early and vigorous support of William H. Taft--who was honorary president of the ARC even as he served as President of the United States--gave the Red Cross invaluable connections with the federal government, eventually making it the official agency to administer aid both at home and abroad. Irwin describes how, during World War I, the ARC grew at an explosive rate and extended its relief work for European civilians into a humanitarian undertaking of massive proportions, an effort that was also a major propaganda coup. Irwin also shows how in the interwar years, the ARC's mission meshed well with presidential diplomatic styles, and how, with the coming of World War II, the ARC once again grew exponentially, becoming a powerful part of government efforts to bring aid to war-torn parts of the world. The belief in the value of foreign aid remains a central pillar of U.S. foreign relations. Making the World Safe reveals how this belief took hold in America and the role of the American Red Cross in promoting it.

The Divo and the Duce

Download The Divo and the Duce PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520972171
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Divo and the Duce by : Giorgio Bertellini

Download or read book The Divo and the Duce written by Giorgio Bertellini and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority. This is the first volume in the new Cinema Cultures in Contact series, coedited by Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Abel, and Matthew Solomon. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.

Italy in the International System from Détente to the End of the Cold War

Download Italy in the International System from Détente to the End of the Cold War PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319651633
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (196 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Italy in the International System from Détente to the End of the Cold War by : Antonio Varsori

Download or read book Italy in the International System from Détente to the End of the Cold War written by Antonio Varsori and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection offers a new approach to the study of Italy’s foreign policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, highlighting its complex and sometimes ambiguous goals, due to the intricacies of its internal system and delicate position in the fault line of the East-West and North-South divides. According to received opinion, during the Cold War era Italy was more an object rather than a factor in active foreign policy, limiting itself to paying lip service to the Western alliance and the European integration process, without any pretension to exerting a substantial international influence. Eleven contributions by leading Italian historians reappraise Italy’s international role, addressing three complex and intertwined issues, namely, the country’s political-diplomatic dimension; the economic factors affecting Rome’s international stance; and Italy’s role in new approaches to the international system and the influence of political parties’ cultures in the nation’s foreign policy.

Colonel House

Download Colonel House PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199391432
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Colonel House by : Charles E. Neu

Download or read book Colonel House written by Charles E. Neu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man who lived his life mostly in the shadows, Edward M. House is little known or remembered today; yet he was one of the most influential figures of the Wilson presidency. Wilson's chief political advisor, House played a key role in international diplomacy, and had a significant hand in crafting the Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference. Though the intimate friendship between the president and his advisor ultimately unraveled in the wake of these negotiations, House's role in the Wilson administration had a lasting impact on 20th century international politics. In this seminal biography, Charles E. Neu details the life of "Colonel" House, a Texas landowner who rose to become one of the century's greatest political operators. Ambitious and persuasive, House worked largely behind the scenes, developing ties of loyalty and using patronage to rally party workers behind his candidates. In 1911 he met Woodrow Wilson, and almost immediately the two formed what would become one of the most famous friendships in American political history. House became a high-level political intermediary in the Wilson administration, proving particularly adept at managing the intangible realm of human relations. After World War I erupted, House, realizing the complexity of the struggle and the dangers and opportunities it posed for the United States, began traveling to and from Europe as the president's personal representative. Eventually he helped Wilson recognize the need to devise a way to end the war that would place the United States at the center of a new world order. In this balanced account, Neu shows that while House was a resourceful and imaginative diplomat, his analysis of wartime politics was erratic. He relied too heavily on personal contacts, often exaggerating his accomplishments and missing the larger historical forces that shaped the policies of the warring powers. Ultimately, as the Paris Peace Conference unfolded, differences appeared between Wilson and his counselor. Their divergent views on the negotiations led to a bitter split, and after the president left France in June of 1919, he would never see House again. Despite this break, Neu refutes the idea that Wilson and House were antagonists. They shared the same beliefs and aspirations and were, Neu shows, part of an unusual partnership. As an organizer, tactician, and confidant, House helped to make possible Wilson's achievements, and this impressive biography restores the enigmatic counselor to his place at the center of that presidency.

A Peaceful Conquest

Download A Peaceful Conquest PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022623245X
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Peaceful Conquest by : Cara Lea Burnidge

Download or read book A Peaceful Conquest written by Cara Lea Burnidge and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most compelling and complicated figures ever to occupy the Oval Office. A political outsider, Wilson brought to the presidency a distinctive, strongly held worldview, built on powerful religious traditions that informed his idea of America and its place in the world. With A Peaceful Conquest, Cara Lea Burnidge presents the most detailed analysis yet of how Wilson’s religious beliefs affected his vision of American foreign policy, with repercussions that lasted into the Cold War and beyond. Framing Wilson’s intellectual development in relationship to the national religious landscape, and paying greater attention to the role of religion than in previous scholarship, Burnidge shows how Wilson’s blend of Southern evangelicalism and social Christianity became a central part of how America saw itself in the world, influencing seemingly secular policy decisions in subtle, lasting ways. Ultimately, Burnidge makes a case for Wilson’s religiosity as one of the key drivers of the emergence of the public conception of America’s unique, indispensable role in international relations. As the presidential election cycle once again raises questions of America’s place in the world, A Peaceful Conquest offers a fascinating excavation of its little-known roots.

The Global Challenge of Peace

Download The Global Challenge of Peace PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1800857195
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Global Challenge of Peace by : Matt Perry

Download or read book The Global Challenge of Peace written by Matt Perry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Parisian hotel rooms, state formation also had a popular dynamic. The Irish Republic was declared. Afghanistan gained independence. Labour unrest was widespread. This year witnessed the emergence of anti-colonial insurgency and movements across Europe's colonies; in metropolitan centres of Empire, race riots took place in the UK and during the 'red summer' in the US, anti-colonial movements, as well as an important moment of political enfranchisement for women but their expulsion from the wartime labour force. 1919 has many legacies: the first Arab spring, with the awakening of nationalism in the Wilsonian and Bolshevik context; the moment (as a consequence of Jallianwala Bagh) that Britain definitively lost its moral claim to India; the definitive announcement of Black presence in the UK; the great reversal of women's participation in the skilled occupations; the first Fascist movement was founded.

Vittorio Orlando

Download Vittorio Orlando PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Haus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1907822143
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (78 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Vittorio Orlando by : Spencer Di Scala

Download or read book Vittorio Orlando written by Spencer Di Scala and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian premier Vittorio Orlando came to Paris as one of the 'Big Four', yet in April 1919 walked out in one of the most dramatic crises of the Peace Conferences. Orlando's failure to win for Italy the territories she felt were owed to her was to have far-reaching consequences for both Italy and Europe as a whole. Italy in 1918 was in an ambivalent position: at the outbreak of war the country had been part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but had stayed neutral until joining the Allies in 1915 on the promise of territorial rewards. The war was a near-disaster for the Italians, culminating in the collapse of their armies at Caporetto in 1917. It was this crisis that brought Orlando to power, and he did much to restore the situation, but the Italians looked to Versailles to compensate them for the terrible losses they had suffered. In this book, the clash between Italy's territorial demands in the Balkans, which had been guaranteed by the Allies in 1915 and earned through her losses in the War, with the new Wilsonian doctrine of open diplomacy and national self-determination is detailed, and it traces the effects the failure of Orlando's delegation to satisfy their people's demands which directly to the rise of Fascism and to Mussolini's policies in the 1930s as he sought to obtain what Italy had been denied at Versailles.

Intersecting Diasporas

Download Intersecting Diasporas PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438481632
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Intersecting Diasporas by : Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Download or read book Intersecting Diasporas written by Suzanne Manizza Roszak and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intersecting Diasporas examines literary expressions of allyship between Italian America and other diasporic communities in modern and contemporary US fiction. Rewriting the Anglo-American genre of the "Italian novel," authors like James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Carolina De Robertis, and Chang-rae Lee have disrupted misconceptions of Italian and Italian American identity while confronting Italians' own complicity with white racism. Likewise, Italian American authors from John Fante to Tina De Rosa have written in solidarity with Black, Chicanx, Filipinx, Jewish, Romani, and Irish diasporic communities on US shores, unsettling stereotypes and dissecting Italian America's history of flawed allyship across diasporas. Suzanne Manizza Roszak traces these gestures of literary solidarity; considers how they relate to the writers' critiques of toxic masculinity, antiqueerness, and socioeconomic injustice; and proposes interdiasporic allyship as a practice of reconciliation and healing.

The Deluge

Download The Deluge PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Penguin Books
ISBN 13 : 0143127977
Total Pages : 674 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (431 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Deluge by : Adam Tooze

Download or read book The Deluge written by Adam Tooze and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing and highly original analysis of the First World War and its anguished aftermath—from the prizewinning economist and author of Shutdown, Crashed and The Wages of Destruction Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - History Finalist for the Kirkus Prize - Nonfiction In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and matériel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrialorder. A century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. From the day the United States enters the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power. Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America’s centrality—including the slide into fascism—The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I.

The Fiume Crisis

Download The Fiume Crisis PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674249690
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Fiume Crisis by : Dominique Kirchner Reill

Download or read book The Fiume Crisis written by Dominique Kirchner Reill and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.