Edizioni FrancoAngeli - Last issue of PASSATO E PRESENTE (85/2012)

Il potere dei giudici e la latitanza della politica

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Melis Guido
The power of judges and the default of politics. Since 1861 the High Court of Magistrates has been part of the top level of the Italian state. It was the task of the Court to turn into jurisprudence the great bourgeois laws, when Italy was still rural and old regime. However the judges held power: internally, as the High Court ruled judicial careers; and externally, because judges protected their privileges. Fascism restricted the liberty of judges, but at the same time allowed them to retain their power of control of careers. In the post-war Republic, the judges discovered the newborn Constitution only in the 1950s and started to defend it. In more recent times, the judges have taken a leading role in the three "emergencies": against terrorism, mafia, and corruption. In all three of these situations they have acted as proxies, given the lack of accountability of politicians.

Archivisti e storici tra diritto all'accesso e Wikileaks

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Barrera Giulia, Giuva Linda
Archivists and historians between freedom of information and Wikileaks. The article argues that Wikileaks does not provide an answer to the citizens’ thirst for transparency. A more democratic and effective answer can rather come from a good Freedom of information law. Italy, however, does not have a Foi law. The article is divided in two parts. The first one analyzes the functioning of Wikileaks up to April 2011 and shows that it created a myth of total transparency and of citizens’ empowerment that is far from reality. The second one explains how in the Usa the existence of a robust Foi was instrumental in the preservation of Presidential e-mails and points out how Foi laws help create public pressure in favor of good records management.

Nazionale purchè locale: l'identità di una lingua fatta in casa

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Binazzi Neri
National but local: the identity of a home-made language. Most of the macroscopic features of the Italian language spoken in contemporary Italy, such as its regional and frequently "non-standard" modes, are to be connected to the somewhat hereditary way in which it is learned. Indeed, for most people the "language of the Nation" has not been acquired through education so much as through individual initiative, that shows up in relevant impingements on the traditional mother tongue. In this perspective the language currently spoken by Italian people confirms the "plurality" characteristic of Italian identity, but is also an indicator of the unachieved sense of belonging to the national community that is a long-term feature of Italian history.

Allegorie della libertà e tipologie del sacro nell'iconografia rivoluzionaria russa

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Dogo Dunja
Allegories of liberty and typologies of the sacred in the iconography of revolutionary Russia. Revolutionary iconography addresses a topic that crosses the field of studies of the Russian Revolution, whose scope in the past two decades has begun to investigate the cultural history of 1917, thanks to easier access to source materials that have re-emerged after the opening of the Russian archives. Above all, the essay attempts to reconstruct how three particular typologies (St. George, the Angel, Liberty) came into use in the Russian revolutionary symbolic system and underwent a metamorphosis, contributing to a phenomenon of syncretism. Such discourses can show how different political subjects – at times on opposing sides - employed a common imagery within a struggle for the conquest of the symbol.

Un dizionario nato vecchio. Legittimazione e delegittimazione della Seconda Repubblica spagnola

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Tappi Andrea, Tébar Hurtado Javier
A dictionary born old. Legitimization and delegitimization of the Second Spanish Republic. The controversy following the recent publication of the Spanish Biographical Dictionary by the Real Academia de la Historia is here analysed. Many entries about the 20th century in Spain highlight the questionable aspects of a cultural project that derives from a public usage typical of the past concerning the legitimization and delegitimization of the Second Spanish Republic.

Tony Judt: il socialismo, gli intellettuali e l'Europa postbellica

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Bresciani Marco
Tony Judt: socialism, intellectuals and postwar Europe sketches an intellectual and historiographical profile of the British Jewish historian Tony Judt (1948-2010). His historical studies concerned French socialism between the 19th and the 20th century, the relationship between French postwar intellectuals and communism, and the East European dissidents. In his masterpiece, Postwar, Judt broadened his historical perspective to Eastern Europe and focussed on the political, social, cultural and economic experiences of the European postwar period.

Storia d'impresa: complessità e comparazioni

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Amatori Franco
Business History: complexity and comparisons. An overview of the last two centuries of business history around the world focusing on three variables: technology, the firm, and the local context. Analysis shows the continuous competition between various countries, from the United States and Japan to China and India, with new waves of technology that make it impossible to forecast history. Business history naturally leads to the larger field of economic history.

La morte dell'eroe

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Battini Michele
The death of the Hero. The discussion of three recent essays, by literary critics George Steiner and Guido Paduano, and the young historian Guri Schwarz, makes it possible to attempt to decode some clues that could show the secret connections between the political religion of the Italian Resistance, the patriotic-romantic and modern Christian attitudes to death and, finally, two different classic paradigms of the Hero. These paradigms were probably still present in the burial rites after the second world war, in the worship as heroes of military, partisans or civilians, and in the veneration for the dead.The most important question involved in the new patriotic epic, so, may be the historical and morphological relationship between death and history, that is to say: a basic question in the history of cultures.

La voce di Fanon. Letture italiane de I dannati della terra (1962-1971)

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Mordiglia Irene
The voice of Fanon. Italian readings of The Wretched of the Earth examines through related analyses, articles and essays published between 1962 and 1971. The key issue in the reception of the book, from the Italian Left parties (Pci, Psi) to the New Left of the student protest movement of 1968, was violence in its moral and political implications.

Dal tabù all'errore. La storiografia croata sulle foibe e l'esodo istriano

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Dota Franko
From taboo to error. Croatian historiography on the “foibe” and the exodus from Istria. The author traces the dominant and most salient elements of discursive and narrative structures present in Croatian historiography of the phenomenon known as the foibe (the execution of Italians in Istria during and after the second world war) and the “Italian exodus” (forced migration after the war). The essay summarizes some of the author’s conclusions in his book on the same theme published in 2010 in Croatia.

La proposta della Global labour history nell'era della "globalizzazione"

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

G. De Vito Christian
The history of labour in a period of "globalization". A proposal of Global labour history. The paper deals with "Global labour history", a historiographical approach developed since the end of the 1980s at the International Institute of Social History (Iish) in Amsterdam, that has gradually become a global network. Its particular response to the crisis of labour and social history and its reconceptualization of the theory, methodology and themes of labour history are discussed. The article concludes addressing the place of "Global labour history" within the broader field of "Global history".

Carteggi tra politica e cultura

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT

A cura di Bongiovanni Bruno

Libri ricevuti

Thu, 15 Feb 2012 8:00:00 GMT