La Grande Italia traces the history of the myth of the nation in Italy along the curve of its rise and fall throughout the twentieth century. Starting with the festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy in 1911 and ending with the centennial celebrations of 1961, Emilio Gentile describes a dense sequence of events: from victorious Italian participation in World War I through the rise and triumph of Fascism to Italy’s transition to a republic.
    Gentile’s definition of “Italians” encompasses the whole range of political, cultural, and social actors: Liberals and Catholics, Monarchists and Republicans, Fascists and Socialists. La Grande Italia presents a sweeping study of the development of Italian national identity in all its incarnations throughout the twentieth century. This important contribution to the study of modern Italian nationalism and the ambition to achieve a “great Italy” between the unification of Italy and the advent of the Italian Republic will appeal to anyone interested in modern European history, Fascism, and nationalism.

Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Regional General Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

Two generations ago, young men and women with only a high-school degree would have entered the plentiful industrial occupations which then sustained the middle-class ideal of a male-breadwinner family. Such jobs have all but vanished over the past forty years, and in their absence ever-growing numbers of young adults now hold precarious, low-paid jobs with few fringe benefits. Facing such insecure economic prospects, less-educated young adults are increasingly forgoing marriage and are having children within unstable cohabiting relationships. This has created a large marriage gap between them and their more affluent, college-educated peers. In Labor’s Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew Cherlin offers a new historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America, demonstrating how momentous social and economic transformations have contributed to the collapse of this once-stable social class and what this seismic cultural shift means for the nation’s future. Drawing from more than a hundred years of census data, Cherlin documents how today’s marriage gap mirrors that of the Gilded Age of the late-nineteenth century, a time of high inequality much like our own. Cherlin demonstrates that the widespread prosperity of working-class families in the mid-twentieth century, when both income inequality and the marriage gap were low, is the true outlier in the history of the American family. In fact, changes in the economy, culture, and family formation in recent decades have been so great that Cherlin suggests that the working-class family pattern has largely disappeared. Labor's Love Lost shows that the primary problem of the fall of the working-class family from its mid-twentieth century peak is not that the male-breadwinner family has declined, but that nothing stable has replaced it. The breakdown of a stable family structure has serious consequences for low-income families, particularly for children, many of whom underperform in school, thereby reducing their future employment prospects and perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of economic disadvantage. To address this disparity, Cherlin recommends policies to foster educational opportunities for children and adolescents from disadvantaged families. He also stresses the need for labor market interventions, such as subsidizing low wages through tax credits and raising the minimum wage. Labor's Love Lost provides a compelling analysis of the historical dynamics and ramifications of the growing number of young adults disconnected from steady, decent-paying jobs and from marriage. Cherlin’s investigation of today’s “would-be working class” shines a much-needed spotlight on the struggling middle of our society in today’s new Gilded Age.

In recent years, community policing has transformed American law enforcement by promising to build trust between citizens and officers. Today, three-quarters of American police departments claim to embrace the strategy. But decades before the phrase was coined, the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) had pioneered community-based crime-fighting strategies.

The Last Neighborhood Cops reveals the forgotten history of the residents and cops who forged community policing in the public housing complexes of New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. Through a combination of poignant storytelling and historical analysis, Fritz Umbach draws on buried and confidential police records and voices of retired officers and older residents to help explore the rise and fall of the HAPD's community-based strategy, while questioning its tactical effectiveness. The result is a unique perspective on contemporary debates of community policing and historical developments chronicling the influence of poor and working-class populations on public policy making.

This is the first comprehensive history of pre–Civil War American radicalism, mapping the journeys of the land reformers, Jacksonian radicals, and militant abolitionists who paved the way to the failed slave revolt at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
            Offering new and fascinating insights into the cast of characters who created a homegrown socialist movement in America—from Thomas Paine’s revolution to Robert Owen’s utopianism, and from Thomas Skidmore’s agrarianism to George Henry Evans’s industrial workers’ reforms—Long Road to Harpers Ferry captures the spirit of the times. Showing how class solidarity and consciousness became more important to a generation of workers than notions of American citizenship, the book offers a fascinating historical background to help us understand the rise of radicalism in the United States today.