477 books match the query 'Italy' and 22 start with m

cover of Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

Margaret Fuller

Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

Edited by Charles Capper and Cristina Giorcelli

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of the predominant writers of the Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with the European revolutionary fervor of the 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune to cover the nascent revolutions, pursuing the transnational ideal awakened in her youth by a classical education in European languages and a Romantic curiosity about other cultures, traditions, and identities.
    This volume is a collaboration of international scholars who, from varied fields and approaches, assess Fuller’s genius and character. Treating the last several years of Margaret Fuller’s short life, these essays offer a truly international discussion of Fuller’s unique cultural, political, and personal achievements. From the origins and articulations of Fuller’s cosmopolitanism to her examination of “the woman question,” and from her fascination with the European “other” to her candid perception of imperial America from abroad, they ponder what such an extraordinary woman meant to America, and also to Italy and Europe, during her lifetime and continuing to the present.
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cover of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia

Marshall Plan Modernism

Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia

Jaleh Mansoor

Duke University Press, 2016

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.
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cover of Measuring Mamma's Milk: Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy

Measuring Mamma's Milk

Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy

Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker

University of Michigan Press, 2000

In Italy as in other Western societies, the medicalization of basic biological functions contributes to the loss of personal confidence in the care of the body. Measuring Mamma's Milk analyzes the medicalization of maternity through a study of breastfeeding practices over a century of changes in socioeconomic organization, family life, and health beliefs. During the pivotal interwar period in Italy, fascism changed the relationship between the state and the public and greatly tightened the state's ties with medicine and science. "Rationalized" breastfeeding was at the heart of programs to reduce infant mortality rates in order to increase the size and "quality" of the population. Highly regimented feeding schedules, still practiced today, came to represent both an eternal, natural function and the conquest of fatal maternal ignorance by modern science. They also had important consequences for fertility and for maternal and child health. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Elizabeth Whitaker shows how fascism went beneath the surface to have a lasting impact on cultural beliefs and behaviors. Measuring Mamma's Milk will appeal to readers interested in Italy, fascism, and the care of young children as well as to scholars in medical and cultural anthropology, European history, history of medicine, and women's studies. Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University. She is the recipient of two Fulbright grants, the second of which sent her to the University of Bologna as a Senior Scholar in 1998-99. She is currently an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C.
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cover of Medieval Public Justice

Medieval Public Justice

Massimo Vallerani

Catholic University of America Press, 2012

In a series of essays based on surviving documents of actual court practices from Perugia and Bologna, as well as laws, statutes, and theoretical works from the 12th and 13th centuries, Massimo Vallerani offers important historical insights into the establishment of a trial-based public justice system.
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cover of Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity

Mediterranean Crossings

The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity

Iain Chambers

Duke University Press, 2008

The cultural theorist Iain Chambers is known for his historically grounded, philosophically informed, and politically pointed inquiries into issues of identity, alterity, and migration, and the challenge postcolonial studies poses to conventional Western thought. With Mediterranean Crossings, he challenges insufficient prevailing characterizations of the Mediterranean by offering a vibrant interdisciplinary and intercultural interpretation of the region’s culture and history. The “Mediterranean” as a concept entered the European lexicon only in the early nineteenth century. As an object of study, it is the product of modern geographical, political, and historical classifications. Chambers contends that the region’s fundamentally fluid, hybrid nature has long been obscured by the categories and strictures imposed by European discourse and government.

In evocative and erudite prose, Chambers renders the Mediterranean a mutable space, profoundly marked by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical, and intellectual dissemination of Arab, Jewish, Turkish, and Latin cultures. He brings to light histories of Mediterranean crossings—of people, goods, melodies, thought—that are rarely part of orthodox understandings. Chambers writes in a style that reflects the fluidity of the exchanges that have formed the region; he segues between major historical events and local daily routines, backwards and forwards in time, and from one part of the Mediterranean to another. A sea of endlessly overlapping cultural and historical currents, the Mediterranean exceeds the immediate constraints of nationalism and inflexible identity. It offers scholars an opportunity to rethink the past and present and to imagine a future beyond the confines of Western humanistic thought.

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cover of Memoir of Italo Svevo

Memoir of Italo Svevo

Livia Veneziani Svevo

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Writer Italo Svevo had many things in common with other writers: a long struggle for recognition; a friendship with a noteworthy author (in Svevo's case, James Joyce); and a long list of neuroses. His choice of a wife, however, was anything but common. Livia Veneziani Svevo tirelessly worked on her husband's behalf after his tragic early death and also penned this remarkable portrait of a serious artist and a loving (if quirky) marriage. Memoir of Italo Svevo tells the story of how a successful middle-aged businessman, as obsessed with smoking as with his abandoned literary ambitions, somehow became one of the great authors of the twentieth century.
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cover of Memoirs

Memoirs

Marie Mancini and Hortense Mancini

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The memoirs of Hortense (1646–1699) and of Marie (1639–1715) Mancini, nieces of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin and members of the court of Louis XIV, represent the earliest examples in France of memoirs published by women under their own names during their lifetimes. Both unhappily married—Marie had also fled the aftermath of her failed affair with the king—the sisters chose to leave their husbands for life on the road, a life quite rare for women of their day.

Through their writings, the Mancinis sought to rehabilitate their reputations and reclaim the right to define their public images themselves, rather than leave the stories of their lives to the intrigues of the court—and to their disgruntled ex-husbands. First translated in 1676 and 1678 and credited largely to male redactors, the two memoirs reemerge here in an accessible English translation that chronicles the beginnings of women’s rights to personal independence within the confines of an otherwise circumscribed early modern aristocratic society.
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cover of Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story

Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew

An Italian Story

Dan Vittorio Segre

University of Chicago Press, 2008

“I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head.” From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre’s memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled Fascist Italy and Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws only to be thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine, completely unprepared for the dangers of life in Israel during World War II. Beautifully narrated, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew is an ironic, philosophical meditation on the historical reverberations of the twentieth century.
 
“Taut and illuminating . . . memorable . . . written with the humility of he who confesses himself and with the honesty of he who bore witness.”—Primo Levi
 
“The writing of memoirs is a difficult art that Dan Segre fully possesses. Under his pen, history and psychology merge in one captivating narrative which illuminates the turmoils, fears and triumphs of his generation.”—Elie Wiesel
 
“Beautifully written. . . . [A] labyrinthine, spell-binding autobiography, full of passionate tenderness.”—New York Review of Books
 
“An unusually attractive book—attractive in its irony, its energy and its moral insight. Mr. Segre had some rich material to work with, and he has done it justice.”—New York Times 
 

 
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cover of Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory

Memoria Romana

Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory

edited by Karl Galinsky

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Concern with memory permeated Roman literature, history, rhetorical training, and art and architecture. This is the first book to look at the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, including cognitive science. There is no orthodoxy in memory studies and the approaches are both empirical and theoretical. A central issue is: who and what preserved and shaped cultural memory in Rome, and how did that process work? Areas and subjects covered include the Romans' view of the changing physical fabric of the city, monuments (by etymology related to memory) such as the Arch of Constantine, memory and the Roman triumph, Roman copies of Greek sculpture and their relation to memory, the importance of written information and of continuing process, the creation of memory in Republican memoirs and Flavian poetry, the invention of traditions, and the connection of cultural and digital memory.

The ten chapters present original findings that complement earlier scholarship from the perspective of memory and open up new horizons for inquiry. The introduction by volume editor Karl Galinsky situates the work within current studies on cultural and social memory, and the concluding chapter by Daniel Libeskind provides the perspective of a contemporary practitioner.

Additional contributors include Richard Jenkyns, Harriet I. Flower, T. P. Wiseman, Karl-J. Hölkeskamp, Gianpiero Rosati, Diane Favro, Jessica Hughes, Anna Anguissola, Lisa Marie Mignone, and Bernard Frischer.

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cover of Michelangelo's Painting: Selected Essays

Michelangelo's Painting

Selected Essays

Leo Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading.

For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures elucidates many of Michelangelo’s paintings, from frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, the artist’s lesser-known works in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel; also included is a study of the relationship of the Doni Madonna to Leonardo.

Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking. Almost everything he wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but always put into the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures, as well as their gestures and interrelations, conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers.

Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. Michelangelo’s Painting is the second volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.
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cover of Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays

Michelangelo’s Sculpture

Selected Essays

Leo Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading.
 
For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of Michelangelo’s most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers—or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo’s art, “anatomy becomes theology.”
 
Michelangelo’s Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of Steinberg’s selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master’s work, a light-hearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.
 
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cover of Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America

Migrant Marketplaces

Food and Italians in North and South America

Elizabeth Zanoni

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways.

Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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cover of Morocco: In the Labyrinth of Dreams and Bazaars

Morocco

In the Labyrinth of Dreams and Bazaars

Walter M. Weiss

Haus Publishing, 2016

While much of the Middle East is now engulfed in conflict and repression, Morocco remains a curious anomaly: peaceful and open to the West, it has provided refuge for artists and writers for generations, and it remains an exotic destination for many curious travelers. The country has been influenced by an incredible variety of peoples—Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Berbers, Muslims, Jews, and most of Europe’s colonizers have played a role—and modern Moroccan society is no less rich and varied.

In Morocco, Walter M. Weiss brings extensive knowledge of the region to bear as he travels the breadth and depth of the country’s social and geographical contrasts. Berber villagers of the mountains are for the most part still illiterate and consider their king to be divinely chosen, while businessmen in Casablanca’s towering offices dream of closer ties to the European Union. Weiss visits the settings of modern legends, such as Tangier, as well as the two medieval centres Fès and Meknès, and sees earthen kasbahs and Marrakech’s bazaar. On the way, he meets acrobats, Sufi musicians, pilgrims, craftsmen, beatniks, rabbis, and Berber farmers—a kaleidoscope of variety and cultural influence.
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cover of Mothers Of Invention: Women, Italian Facism, and Culture

Mothers Of Invention

Women, Italian Facism, and Culture

Robin Pickering-Iazzi

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

The first in-depth look at culture produced by women in Fascist Italy.

Mothers of Invention was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

To Mussolini, she was either donna-madre, the lauded domestic model, or donna-crisi, intellectual, masculine, a degenerate type. But woman, as Mothers of Invention shows, was not a category so easily defined or contained by the Italian Fascist state. This volume is the first thorough investigation of culture produced by Italian women during Fascism (1922-1943).In literature, painting, sculpture, film, and fashion, the contributors explore the politics of invention articulated by these women as they negotiated prevailing ideologies. Essays on women’s film spectatorship, on Anna Kuliscioff as the leading feminist in the Socialist party, on Teresa Labriola’s concept of Fascist feminism, on futurism and on Irene Brin’s reportage on female fashion and self-invention examine women in mass culture, political thought, and daily living. Contributors: Rosalia Colombo Ascari, Sweet Briar College; Fiora A. Bassanese, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Maurizia Boscagli, U of California, Santa Barbara; Emily Braun, Hunter College, CUNY; Carole C. Gallucci; Mariolina Graziosi, U of Milan; Clara Orban, Depaul U; Lucia Re, UCLA; Jacqueline Reich, Trinity College; and Barbara Spackman, New York University.
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cover of Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750: From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy

Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750

From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy

Anthony M. Cummings

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A comprehensive account of music in Florence from the late Middle Ages until the end of the Medici dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. 

Florence is justly celebrated as one of the world’s most important cities. It enjoys mythic status and occupies an enviable place in the historical imagination. But its musico-historical importance is not as well understood as it should be. If Florence was the city of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo, it was also the birthplace of the madrigal, opera, and the piano. Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750 recounts Florence’s principal contributions to music and the history of how music was heard and cultivated in the city, from civic and religious institutions to private patronage and the academies. This book is an invaluable complement to studies of the art, literature, and political thought of the late-medieval and early-modern eras and the quasi-legendary figures in the Florentine cultural pantheon.
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cover of Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries

Music in the Castle

Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries

F. Alberto Gallo

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Written by one of Italy's most eminent scholars of music, this book explores music's place in the cultural, artistic, and literary life of medieval Italian courts, paying particular attention to the influence of French culture on Italian artistic and musical traditions.

In the first of three elegant essays, Gallo examines the troubadours who traveled to northern Italian courts from Provence during the thirteenth century. He discusses their performance practices, the verbal and musical sophistication of their songs, and their role in the daily life of courtiers at Genoa, Ferrara, and Monferrato. The second essay concerns the now dispersed collection of the Visconti library at Pavia. Here, Gallo examines how this collection expressed the tastes of the fourteenth-century court of Giangaleazzo Visconti, how French arts were imported and imitated at Pavia, and the effects this had on music heard at the court. In the final essay, Gallo looks at the fifteenth-century tradition of improvised music, and especially the virtuoso lute player Pietrobono. Mythologized in literary circles of his day, Pietrobono becomes a point of departure for a discussion of the entire vision of music of Italian humanists, from Guarino Veronese to Aurelio Brandolini.
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cover of Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time

Music in the Present Tense

Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time

Emanuele Senici

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this recent fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation.

Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by examining the composer’s works in the historical context in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. Situating the operas firmly within the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, Senici reveals Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense exposes new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity, such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.
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cover of Mussolini's Army in the French Riviera: Italy's Occupation of France

Mussolini's Army in the French Riviera

Italy's Occupation of France

Emanuele Sica

University of Illinois Press, 2016

In contrast to its brutal seizure of the Balkans, the Italian Army's 1940-1943 relatively mild occupation of the French Riviera and nearby alpine regions bred the myth of the Italian brava gente, or good fellow, an agreeable occupier who abstained from the savage wartime behaviors so common across Europe.

Employing a multi-tiered approach, Emanuele Sica examines the simultaneously conflicting and symbiotic relationship between the French population and Italian soldiers. At the grassroots level, Sica asserts that the cultural proximity between the soldiers and the local population, one-quarter of which was Italian, smoothed the sharp angles of miscommunication and cultural faux-pas at a time of great uncertainty. At the same time, it encouraged a laxness in discipline that manifested as fraternization and black marketeering. Sica's examination of political tensions highlights how French prefects and mayors fought to keep the tatters of sovereignty in the face of military occupation. In addition, he reveals the tense relationship between Fascist civilian authorities eager to fulfil imperial dreams of annexation and army leaders desperate to prevent any action that might provoke French insurrection. Finally, he completes the tableau with detailed accounts of how food shortages and French Resistance attacks brought sterner Italian methods, why the Fascists' attempted "Italianization" of the French border city of Menton failed, and the ways the occupation zone became an unlikely haven for Jews.

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cover of My Father's War: Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II

My Father's War

Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II

Carolyn Ross Johnston

University of Alabama Press, 2012

A compelling story of a unit of Buffalo Soldiers and their white commander fighting on the Italian front during World War II.

The 92nd Division of the Fifth Army was the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe during 1944 and 1945, suffering more than 3,200 casualties. Members of this unit, known as Buffalo Soldiers, endured racial violence on the home front and experienced racism abroad. Engaged in combat for nine months, they were under the command of southern white infantry officers like their captain, Eugene E. Johnston. 

Carolyn Ross Johnston draws on her father’s account of the war and her extensive interviews with other veterans of the 92nd Division to describe the experiences of a naïve southern white officer and his segregated unit on an intimate level. During the war, the protocol that required the assignment of southern white officers to command black units, both in Europe and in the Pacific theater, was often problematic, but Johnston seemed more successful than most, earning the trust and respect of his men at the same time that he learned to trust and respect them. Gene Johnston and the African American soldiers were transformed by the war and upon their return helped transform the nation.

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cover of My Version of the Facts

My Version of the Facts

Carla Pekelis, translated from the Italian by George Hochfield

Northwestern University Press, 2005

"What did it mean to be a Jewish child in Italy at the beginning of the century?" Carla Pekelis asks herself. "As a matter of fact, nothing, absolutely nothing!" But shortly, as fascism began its march through her homeland and racial laws slowly constricted her world, Carla would learn that being a Jew in Italy might indeed have a profound meaning and dire consequences. Her recollections form an absorbing, nuanced portrait of a life transformed, and a world transfigured, by the relentless currents of history.
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cover of My War in Italy: On the Ground and in Flight with the 15th Air Force

My War in Italy

On the Ground and in Flight with the 15th Air Force

Keith W. Mason

University of Missouri Press, 2027

Six weeks before Pearl Harbor, Keith Mason received a $150 uniform allowance, a pair of silver wings, and his first assignment as a flight instructor: Randolph Field, Texas. Two years later, he was Squadron Officer in the 460th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force in Spinazzola, Italy - flying the harrowing combat missions he dreamed of as a boy in rural Iowa.

As a memoir of one man’s war years, Mason provides insight on the inner workings of serving as an airman during World War II: facing stultifying boredom, stupefying incompetence, paralyzing fear, and stunning success. Details of how crews were selected for combat missions, of the necessity to occasionally break up crews, and of select missions in which Mason was a participant are important additions to the history and literature of this often neglected theater.

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cover of Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia

Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia

Edited by Giovanni Casadio and Patricia A. Johnston

University of Texas Press, 2009

In Vergil's Aeneid, the poet implies that those who have been initiated into mystery cults enjoy a blessed situation both in life and after death. This collection of essays brings new insight to the study of mystic cults in the ancient world, particularly those that flourished in Magna Graecia (essentially the area of present-day Southern Italy and Sicily).

Implementing a variety of methodologies, the contributors to Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia examine an array of features associated with such "mystery religions" that were concerned with individual salvation through initiation and hidden knowledge rather than civic cults directed toward Olympian deities usually associated with Greek religion. Contributors present contemporary theories of ancient religion, field reports from recent archaeological work, and other frameworks for exploring mystic cults in general and individual deities specifically, with observations about cultural interactions throughout. Topics include Dionysos and Orpheus, the Goddess Cults, Isis in Italy, and Roman Mithras, explored by an international array of scholars including Giulia Sfameni Gasparro ("Aspects of the Cult of Demeter in Magna Graecia") and Alberto Bernabé ("Imago Inferorum Orphica"). The resulting volume illuminates this often misunderstood range of religious phenomena.

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