Conclusion

This book examines the influence of American culture in Italy during the decades between unification in 1861 and the implosion of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in July 1943. During this period the country witnessed large-scale social and economic modernization as well as an unprecedented explosion of mass culture. Focusing on six key fields of study—the press, literature, cinema, music, radio and the comics industry—the book traces a gradual shift from the hegemonic influence of France on Italy’s highbrow culture to the emergence of the USA as a new transnational model of modernity, able to address all social classes. This phenomenon coincided with the mass migration of Italians, whose hopes for a better life across the ocean produced a positive image of America that was largely at loggerheads with a more dismissive reaction from Italy’s educated elite. By tracing the presence of American culture in Italy, this book offers new perspectives on the development of Italian culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also offers a thorough revision of how Mussolini’s regime responded to American culture, from jazz music to Hollywood films, and dismisses the myth of a fundamentally anti-American totalitarian regime. While scholarship to date has focused on the pervasive influence of American culture in the aftermath of the Second World War, this book tells the story of its first arrival, at a time when the French model was still dominant and Italy was beginning to embrace modernity and mass culture. The book is divided into two parts, each containing five chapters: Part One is entitled ‘The Discovery of America, 1861–1919’, while Part Two covers ‘America in Fascist Italy, 1922–1943’.

The period of the First World War and interwar years was both a watershed for women and a period of backlash against women’s achievements. This chapter examines the possibilities, paradoxes, and challenges of military women’s lives and activities in the First World War and interwar years. It addresses the service of women physicians, nurses, and women workers with the military and voluntary organizations. The chapter assesses the activities of women in revolutionary, nationalist struggles and civil war beyond the First World War years. It analyzes the roles of women in the military in the interwar years and as veterans of military institutions. In France the Service de sante militaire worked with the Red Cross and Catholic nursing orders prior to the war and so plans were in place to mobilize nurses at the start of the conflict. Keywords:first world war; military; nurses; voluntary organizations; women auxiliaries; women physicians; women’s mobilization

The arrival of Islam in Italy in the seventh century led to cultural acculturation and changes in several areas of life, such as literature, culture and language. The aims of this study are to: (1) Describe the process of the arrival of Islam in Italy; (2) Describe the influence of Islamic and Arabic culture in Italy. and (3) explaining the development of Arabic science and literature in Italy. This research is included in the descriptive qualitative research with a literature study approach and the data collection techniques used are reading techniques and note-taking techniques. The results of this study are: (1) The process of the arrival of Islam in Italy began when Caliph Othman bin Affan sent the prime minister Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan to attack Sicily in 652 AD. (2) There are traces of Islamic culture in the architecture of the city in the form of narrow alleys that follows the ancient Arabic style of the city of Amalfi, and the assimilation of Italian words of Arabic origin is close to 300 words; And (3) in the development of scientific and literary journals, Muslim scientists have certainly produced various major works which later became references for Western scientists. Besides that, Arabic literature also entered and developed in Sicily which became a heaven for scholars such as al-Jabr wa Maalaka, Firdaus al-Hikmah, Al-Hawi. Apart from that, Arabic literature also entered and developed in Sicily, becoming a paradise for scholars, such as the story of Layla Majnun which was outlined in the book The Secretum by Petrarch and ST. Augustine.

The volume collects eight essays on economic and legal culture in Italy in the period between the two world wars. Some of the essays investigate the relationship between the fascist regime and intellectuals, as in the case of the jurist Alfredo Rocco and the economists Luigi Amoroso, Arrigo Serpieri and Alberto Bertolino. Other essays deal with the ways and places through which economics and law were popularised during the fascist dictatorship. The in-depth cases are those of the Bocconi University of Milan and of the School of Corporate Sciences of Pisa. Finally, two essays deal with economic policy in the liberal phase of fascism and with the nature assumed by the legal debate on the corporate problem, identifying in these experiences salient moments of the evolution of the relationship between state and market.

The Introduction addresses some of the key aspects related to the overall context and rationale of this book. It is divided into two parts. The first one—‘The Academic Context’—provides an overview of the range of studies dedicated to American culture in Italy and situates the current book as filling a distinct gap in the study of the arrival and perception of American culture in Italy during the post-unification decades. The second part—‘Questions of Methodology’—dwells on the multidisciplinary make-up of the book. It defines the cultural fields that are at the centre of this study—the press, literature, cinema, music, radio, and comics magazines—after which it moves to a discussion of both the methodological choices relating to the organization of the book and the significant presence of more than a hundred illustrations as a complementary part of the book’s written narrative.

This article examines a selection of content from the Australian travel magazine ‘Holiday and Travel’ published between 1947 and 1951 with a focus on articles and advertising promoting North Queensland as a travel destination. The content surveyed reveals a variety of themes from wellness, relaxation, and recreation to calls for further development of regions, contrasting with articles highlighting the virtues of the natural beauty of the North. The articles highlighting the burgeoning development of tourism construct this new industry as a pathway to economic success with little commentary on potential environmental impact. This provides important historical context for the increasing tourism development which took place in the state in the second half of the 20th century and beyond. In some articles the spectre of the Second World War emerges as the benefactor of infrastructure which facilitates easier travel. This article argues that the magazine continued some of the trends in travel writing begun in the interwar period, while also operating in a new post-war context, wherein writers incorporated an active intent to offer readers a mental transition from the challenges of the war years to a potential future of leisure, relaxation and economic prosperity through travel.

Chapter 2 explores the perception and influence of American culture in Italy’s public debate during the period following unification. The title refers to Disraeli’s famous conception of ‘two nations’ in order to highlight the need to distinguish between Italy’s educated elite and the vast majority of semi-illiterate Italians, many of whom crossed the ocean in search of a better life. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first concentrates on differing visions of America in the daily press and illustrated magazines. A key point of discussion in this section is the term ‘Americanata’, a popular neologism introduced in the 1870s (and still in use today) that encapsulated a condescending view of American culture. The second section concentrates on the impact of William Cody’s 1890 and 1906 tours of Italy with his ‘Buffalo Bill’ Wild West show. The third and final section explores the ways and forms in which the vast mass of near-illiterate citizens built a vision—more imagined than real—of the United States of America.

Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919-1943examines the nature of the inter-Service crisis between the British Army and the RAF over the provision of effective air support for the army in the Second World War. Material for this book is drawn primarily from the rich collection of documents at the National Archives (UK) and other British archives. The author makes a highly original point that Britain's independent RAF was in fact a disguised blessing for the Army and that the air force's independence was in part a key reason why a successful solution to the army's air support problems was found. The analysis traces why the British army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support and how an effective system of support was organized by the RAF. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origins and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early years of the Second World War. The provision of direct air support was of central importance to the success enjoyed by Anglo-American armies during the latter half of the Second World War. First in North Africa, and later in Italy and North-West Europe, American, British and Empire armies fought most if not all of their battles with the knowledge that they enjoyed unassailable air superiority throughout the battle area. This advantage, however, was the product of a long and bitter dispute between the British Army and the Royal Air Force that began at the end of the First World War and continued virtually unabated until it was resolved in late 1942 and early 1943 when the 2nd Tactical Air Force was created. Battlefield experience and, in particular, success in North Africa, combined with the hard work, wisdom and perseverance of Air Marshals Sir Arthur Tedder and Arthur Coningham, the active co-operation of General Bernard Montgomery, and the political authority of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, produced a uniquely British system that afforded the most comprehensive, effective and flexible air support provided by any air force during the war. The book is divided into two equal parts of five chapters. Part one surveys how the British Army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support, and part two explains how an effective system of air support was organized by the middle years of the war. The analysis traces Britain's earliest experience with aircraft in the Great War 1914-1918, the inter-war period of doctrinal development and inter-Service rivalry, and the major campaigns in France and the Middle East during the first half of the Second World War when the weaknesses in Army-RAF co-operation were first exposed and eventually resolved. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origin and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early years of the Second World War.

REVIEWS 303 movements and resettlement of population, including Vlakhs, by Hungarian kings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Explanations for this exodus like the one Vásáry provides, namely that “Vlakh groups flocked to medieval Hungary from the Balkans, attracted by the possibility of a lighter tax burden and other favourable conditions” (157), are not supported by any representative statistical data (what was the tax burden south of the Danube?) and suggest a demographic growth of the Romanian population in the next centuries that simply defies logic. Vásáry is reviving obsolete approaches to the ethnic and demographic history of the region by accepting the positivist interpretation that large events like battles and conquests necessarily predate ethnic changes. Thus, the large-scale colonization of the lands east of the Carpathians (the future Moldavia) can only postdate the victorious expedition of Louis I against the Tatars, who had to relinquish their control of the region and allow immigration (156), while the Vlakh domination of Wallachia must necessarily have been the consequence of the post-1242 Hungarian creation of the Banate of Severin. It seems that Vásáry’s self-limiting approach to studying the Cuman and Tatar presence along the Lower Danube was dictated not so much by his desire to exemplify the state of “feudal anarchy” in the Balkans, but to support his unlikely claim that no Vlakh population whatsoever lived north of the Balkans before the thirteenth century. Such a claim can be maintained only when one deliberately chooses to use nothing but narrative sources and draw conclusions from the inevitably rigid labeling policy of medieval authors. Thus, since in the thirteenth century the future Wallachia was referred to as Cumania in the Latin sources (Vásáry himself admits that Greek sources use the toponym of Koumania only three times, cf. 137), we are expected to conclude that only Cumans lived in the area. One suspects that the author’s unwillingness to provide any theoretical considerations of the social and economic contacts between nomads and sedentary population was a deliberate choice to bring the discussion of the ethnic history of present-day Romania to where it was during the interwar period . Considering Vásáry’s attacks on long-dead Bulgarian and Romanian nationalist historians, one feels that this book would have found its proper audience sixty years ago. At present, it creates a feeling of national prejudice. BORIS TODOROV, History, UCLA Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2005) 403 pp., ill. Evelyn Welch’s Shopping in the Renaissance is a vivid, fascinating, and welldocumented account of shopping practices in early modern Italy. Drawing on a wide array of sources ranging from visual and literary representations of marketplaces to notarial contracts, family records, and account books, Welch maps out the spatiotemporal, political, legal, and moral frameworks that defined market activity. Welch notes that, on the one hand, the variety of commodities, services , and forms of acquisition expanded the definition of what constituted a marketable product and allowed for a more widespread circulation of goods. On the other, this same flexibility constituted at the same time a source of anxiety , exposing the volatility of the boundaries that defined class and gender roles outside the marketplace. Welch’s approach addresses both aspects of the mar- REVIEWS 304 ket as a meeting ground with permeable boundaries, which downplayed class, gender, and religious divisions in favor of a common desire for commercial profit and acquisition of goods, and also a battleground for conflicting religious, commercial, and political interests. Part 1 of the book, “Seeing Shopping,” focuses on early Modern perceptions of the Italian marketplace as a twin metaphor of fecundity and moral corruption. In chapter 2, “Markets and Metaphors,” Welch discusses the social, political, and moral significations attached to the marketplace, by examining fourteenthto sixteenth-century written and visual representations of its participants and their interaction, which range from positive images of fecundity and social stability to negative views associating the market with sensuality, disease, and materialism. These stereotypical concepts can be traced back to early fourteenth -century representations, such as the fresco cycle in the...

Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 280 pp., 40 color and 40 b/w illus. $28, ISBN 9781780230269, by Iain Borden. Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, 320 pp., 112 color and 102 b/w illus. $59.95, ISBN 9781606061282, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.. Car Country: An Environmental History Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 464 pp., 7 maps and 44 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780295992150, by Christopher W. Wells. In July 2013, a New York Times headline proclaimed “the end of car culture.” Though the summer driving season offered plenty of evidence to the contrary, recent data indicate that fewer Americans are driving fewer miles in fewer cars, and even forgoing the adolescent ritual of getting a driver’s license upon turning sixteen. Thus, the Times felt confident in declaring that the country’s century-old love affair with the automobile was finally, inevitably, running out of gas. But if the romance with the car is cooling down, studying its fraught legacy is still plenty hot, as a spate of recent publications makes clear. In fact, in the hundred years since the first Model Ts rolled off the assembly line at Highland Park, Michigan, the car and its social, spatial, and economic impact have been under almost continual scrutiny, producing triumphant Fordist narratives and muckraking antisprawl screeds in almost equal measure. More nuanced, scholarly studies emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century with The Automobile and American Culture (1980; David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds.), a notable early example that attempted a comprehensive analysis of what its editors called the “auto-consciousness” of the United States. The continued evolution of that consciousness is fully evident in the three books under review here, each of which tackles a distinct aspect of the culture of automobility. In Car Country , Christopher W. Wells tracks its environmental evolution; in Drive , Iain Borden scrutinizes its experiential representation; in Overdrive , seventeen contributors examine its urban and architectural influence in Los Angeles, the world’s original autopia. Unsurprisingly, all three books deal principally with twentieth-century developments in the United States, though each pushes these parameters in important ways. Car Country begins with the infrastructural consequences of streetcars and railways in the 1880s. Overdrive , which …

The stylistic trend of neorealism developed in many countries throughout the 20th century – from the era of decadence to the postmodern period. This development is related to new modernist trends and ideas, not just classical realism. The purpose of the study: to introduce the concept of "neorealism" into a wider context. The theoretical basis is the historical-literary analysis and comparative comparison (comparative-typological and receptological methods). The influence of realist traditions is undeniable in the early works of the avant-garde James Joyce and even in the search for a new manner of prose writing – "stream of consciousness" – in "Ulysses". Vivid examples of the complex interaction of the realistic tradition of the 19th century and modern ideas are the works of Luigi Pirandello, Thomas Mann, and other modernists. The new philosophical foundation of realism in the 20th century is modern "philosophy of life" and existentialist philosophy. Italian neorealism as an independent stylistic trend began to emerge already in the period of the approach of the Second World War and immediately after it, when it received recognition in criticism. Italian criticism gave this current the name "neorealism", borrowing from philosophy and considering the bygone era of realism. In the middle of the 20th century the development of neorealism is conditioned by the crisis state of culture in post-totalitarian societies, primarily by the need to overcome totalitarian myths and stereotypes of the mass consciousness, caused by the dominance of propaganda and political or aesthetic dogmatism. Neorealist art is connected with the development of mass culture. However, true neorealist art was not able to overcome totalitarian prejudices and stereotypes everywhere. The revival of imperial totalitarian ideology in modern Russia is connected with the "dying" of neorealism in the 1950s and 1980s. In the literature of the former USSR, neorealism opposed socialist realism. Officially declared in the totalitarian world under the control of the Soviet Union, the trend of social realism purely formally declared the principles of realistic art, in particular "the true reflection of life", but had nothing to do with neorealism, except for the external entourage and declarations.

Didžiojo karo veiksmų Rytų Prūsijoje poveikis Rusijos ir rusų kolektyvinių įvaizdžių turiniui, remiantis Vokietijos tekstualiniu 1914–1939 m. diskursu, analizuotas fragmentiškai ligšioliniuose tyrimuose. Todėl straipsnyje*, taikant metodologines įvaizdžių ir archetipų (Carlas Gustavas Jungas) teorijos bei karo psichologijos (Jennifer Diane Keene, Charlesas Webelis, Charlesas Fischeris) prieigas, siekiama atskleisti Rusijos ir rusų „invazijos“ Rytų Prūsijoje įvaizdžių, stereotipų bei mitologemų genezės prielaidas ir šių predikatinių nuostatų semantinius bruožus 1914–1939 m. Vokietijoje publikuotuose atsiminimuose apie Didįjį karą.

Because of the failure of the peacemakers at the end of the First World War to address and resolve the issues relevant to peace in Europe in general and in Eastern Europe in particular, interwar Romania faced numerous crises. These affected the course of its history between the two world wars, and the post-Second World War and post-communist eras. Whether the specific crises affecting the country could have been alleviated through compromises by the political protagonists of the interwar years is conjectural; however, the almost total rejection of compromise solutions by the power and social elites is also important in any assessment of Romania’s political development at this time.

The article is devoted to the assessment of the results of the Bolshevik modernization of Russia in the 20-30s of the 20th century in its military-technological, personnel and political aspects on the example of the struggle of Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany in the first years of World War II and the Great Patriotic War. The relevance of the topic is due to the contradictions in the assessments of the Bolshevik transformations of the 20-30s. In historiography and in the public mind, disputes about the role of these transformations for victory in the Second World War and WWII are not abating. This is especially true of the first years of the Second World War, which led the USSR to disaster. This problem was analyzed by an outstanding theoretician, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and a figure of the Russian intellectual emigration V.M. Chernov. As historical sources, the article considers a number of such interesting documents as the letter of V.M. Chernov to I. V. Stalin in 1942 and issues of the emigre magazine “For Freedom!ˮ published in the USA. Using these sources as an example, the position of V.M. Chernov on the successes and failures of the Bolshevik reform of Russia and the related victories and defeats of the Red Army in the early years of the War. It is proved that the failures of the USSR in the first years of the War were the result of a number of political and personnel problems, some of which were caused by the accelerated "assault" nature of the Bolshevik modernization of the 1920s and 1930s.

The 1980s debate about defensive concepts can be traced to several historical sources. One is early public debates and diplomatic negotiations on arms control related to, for example, the inter-war Washington naval treaties and Geneva Disarmament Conference. A second is the post-war settlements of 1918–19 and 1945; a third is the post-Second World War ‘German problem7. A fourth is the practice of certain neutral states. In examining these sources, one finds several recurring ideas: a conviction that arms races cause war; a sense that offensive and defensive armaments can be distinguished; a belief in the political, military, and moral power of defensive weapons and buffer zones; a preference for conscript, reservist, or militia forms of military organisation over professional standing armies; a desire for public awareness to replace secrecy in military matters; and a willingness to consider the role of one’s own country in threat creation. The brief survey presented here identifies defensive antecedents in three periods: the inter-war years, the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, and the 1950s through the 1970s. These ‘eras’ were chosen both to organise ideas that emerged from disparate sources and to highlight certain turning points in the development of those ideas.KeywordsNuclear WeaponHistorical AntecedentNuclear DeterrenceOffensive WeaponSurprise AttackThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.