Papers by Marco Bernardi
TrIBES, 2024
In the annals of Italian collective memory, few episodes are as contentious and laden with ideolo... more In the annals of Italian collective memory, few episodes are as contentious and laden with ideological import as the Foibe massacres and the Exodus. These events not only scar the history of WWII but have also become focal points in the complex process of constructing national identity in contemporary Italy. The paper is a piece of dissemination. It delves into how the narratives surrounding these historical episodes have been harnessed, shaped, and sometimes manipulated, revealing the potent interplay between history and political narration.
The interplay between history and politics raises critical questions: How do we choose to remember, and what does this say about our societal values and aspirations? As we examine the process of identity construction through the lens of the Foibe and Exodus, we invite readers to consider the profound impact of historical narratives in shaping our understanding of the present and future.
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Giornale di storia contemporanea, 2023
The article investigates the military strategy employed by the Fascists in Piedmont, Liguria, and... more The article investigates the military strategy employed by the Fascists in Piedmont, Liguria, and Aosta Valley in 1921-1922. The present study aims to show that fascist political violence had specific and new features that were incomparable to earlier and contemporary forms of violence. Thus, the inquiry questions the categories of the red and black biennium and that of civil war. The research is based on documents from the Central State Archive that have not yet been used. The article consists of three parts: in the introduction, I outline sources and research objectives; in the central part, after a framing of the State’s attitude toward the fascists, I analyse three main types of fascist actions, showing how squadrista violence has not only practical purposes but it was a political message. In the conclusions, I summarise the peculiarities of fascist violence and point out its outcomes for the historiographical interpretation of the years.
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In C. Liermann Traniello (A cura di), Cantiere Europa – Ri-Costruzioni italo-tedesche. Europas Baustelle – deutsch-italienische Re-Konstruktionen. (37-61). Como: Vigoni Editori. ISBN ITA: 9788894698725 ISBN DEU: 9783985954650, 2023
The issue of the Fascist and Nazi past is one of the most studied by Italian and German historiog... more The issue of the Fascist and Nazi past is one of the most studied by Italian and German historiographies, which deal with the problem of the public use of history. It is an issue that is, in many ways, obvious but extraordinarily concerning studies and reflections.
In these pages, I propose a study of two recent films, Er ist wieder da and Sono tornato, as an interesting source for enriching the framework of studies on how Italian and German societies use, reuse and judge their dictatorial past. The goal is to analyse (dis)continuities between the movies’ messages and the social attitudes toward the Nazi and Fascist past.
The contribution is both in Italian and German. It consists of three parts. In the first, I reconstruct briefly the forms and contents of the history of film and television representations of Fascism and Nazism with particular attention to their leaders. In the second, I analyse the main features and peculiarities of the two films. In the conclusions, I show how, although the products are almost identical in message and aesthetics, the national context determines two different interpretations concerning the actuality of the danger of neo-Nazism and neo-Fascism.
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M. Bernardi, F. Milazzo (Eds.), La devianza in Italia dall’Unità al fascismo. Discorsi e figure (p. 5-16). Milano: Biblion. ISBN: 9788833832913., 2022
The present paper is an introduction to an anthology of investigations on the topic of the devian... more The present paper is an introduction to an anthology of investigations on the topic of the deviance in Italy between the Unity and the rise of Fascism. The book is characterized by multi-disciplinary forms of analyses, different themes, and multimodal approaches, thus giving a variegated and rich description of forms of deviance and discrimination. The concept of deviance is strictly connected with the one of social control, indeed.
The present introduction is composed of two parts. First, it is a very brief history of the concept of deviance and the main types of study and branches of knowledge that dealt with the topic. Second, there is a very short summary of the thirteen chapters of the book.
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M. Bernardi, F. Milazzo (Eds.), La devianza in Italia dall’Unità al fascismo. Discorsi e figure (14-26). Milano: Biblion. ISBN: 9788833832913, 2022
Lombroso was not the first to propose the idea that there is a connection between biology and dev... more Lombroso was not the first to propose the idea that there is a connection between biology and deviance, nor was he the first to inquire about things that are today commonly referred to as criminals’ popular culture (e.g., songs and wall graffiti). However, his book L’uomo delinquente (1876) achieved incomparable success. Although psychiatry in the late XIX century and, in general, positivistic culture in Italy should not be identified exclusively with Lombroso’s work, the two main ideas of the Veronese physician were unavoidable for both his detractors and his supporters, naming: first, the idea that people with some physical characteristics (hereditary such as the forms of the cranial bones as well as acquired, such as tattoos) are naturally predisposed to crime; second, the idea that those characteristics are a sign of evolutionary inferiority (atavism).
The present paper inquires about the social success of the category of atavism within two newspapers with a large circulation between the mid-1860s and 1922 (La Stampa and Corriere della sera). The research aims to verify whether and how Lombroso’s ideas actually shaped Italian mass culture in Italy between the late XIX and early XX century. It is digital history research that employs tools borrowed from computer-assisted discourse studies (CADS).
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G. De Luna (Ed). Fascismo e Storia d’Italia. A un secolo dalla marcia su Roma. Temi, Narrazioni, Fonti (p. 403-423). Milano: Feltrinelli. ISBN: 9788807990830., 2022
The present paper inquires about the narratives concerning Resistance and anti-Fascism within the... more The present paper inquires about the narratives concerning Resistance and anti-Fascism within the programs of Italian public television (RAI) since the mid-1950s. The research was performed primarily with primary sources from the RAI archives, and it investigates both documentaries and entertainment programs. It is a quali-quantitative study as it inquires about quantitative features (such as the number of programs and preference for themes), contents, and qualitative ones (such as aesthetic features, historical and moral judgments, and links with mainstream historiography). The research inquires about TV programs through seventy years and divides it into periods consistent concerning the forms and themes, which are described through examples and cases of study. The research is a history of media and cultural history investigation and has at least a twofold value. First, it is a documented and long-term analysis of a relevant part of RAI production. Second, as it is a study in the field of public communication of history, the research is a valuable contribution to the progress of historiography on the issue: the relationship between Italian public television and the communication of anti-Fascism is still few investigated, especially for what concerns the more recent years.
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Il Presente e la Storia, 2020
Albeit it is undisputed that history is useful, there is no clear definition of the contents of s... more Albeit it is undisputed that history is useful, there is no clear definition of the contents of such usefulness. The main reason lies in the widespread ambiguity concerning the scientific peculiarity of history as a subject of study. It is commonly believed – though not explicitly uttered – that historical knowledge has to do with memory instead of with logical reasoning. Therefore, history is typically studied and taught as a sort of memory exercise, and accordingly, it is loved or hated. More often than not, for students and teachers studying history consists in learn by heart dates, names, and much information, whose unique common feature consists in the fact they occurred in past ages. In that form, history is entirely useless and meaningless. The real usefulness of history consists in the fact that it can lead to a better ability to manage the complexity of society. Therefore, it is a specific form of reasoning, which one need to deal with everyday ordeals.
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Lessico di Etica pubblica, 2021
During the last year, the Covid-19 pandemic was probably the most debated and mediatized traumati... more During the last year, the Covid-19 pandemic was probably the most debated and mediatized traumatic event. The present paper investigates a group of tweets posted in the first year of the pandemic by several Italian politicians, including both the opposition and the ruling parties. The analysis aims to inquire about public discourse’s argumentation forms and themes concerning the topic. Such an analysis has a twofold nature, naming linguistic and moral, for the investigation on the forms of the communication of the ruling class can lead to a deeper understanding of feelings and reactions of the society to the pandemic ordeal.
http://www.eticapubblica.it/m-bernardi-un-anno-di-tweet-la-comunicazione-del-covid-19-da-parte-dei-politici-italiani-tramite-twitter/
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Journal of Historical Sociology, 2019
This paper examines the victimization policy in Italian history through a multifaceted investigat... more This paper examines the victimization policy in Italian history through a multifaceted investigation of Italian toponymy: statistics, history, and communication. The investigation shows that the attitudes of victimhood and chauvinism in the public discourse concerning the Italian past became not only socially prevalent but also part of the official rhetoric of the Republic. These narratives resulted in moral shifts concerning the national past, and the foibe (mass killings in Northeast Italy at the end of World War II) became the most representative and celebrated event, as testified by the co-occurrence of the concept of "martyrdom" with the foibe.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/johs.12253
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Il presente e la storia, 2019
Nuto Revelli’s investigations contributed to an increase in several social sciences concerning bo... more Nuto Revelli’s investigations contributed to an increase in several social sciences concerning both the methodology and the contents. Therefore, it has never been easy to pinpoint his work exactly – was he an anthropologist? a sociologist? a historian? Especially after his death, many explicitly acknowledged the scientific value of his work. More specifically, many historians paid homage to him as well as stated that his books significantly contributed to the development of many new fields of research – such as microhistory and oral history. However, some specific issue of his inquiries are still underinvestigated, neglected, or even misinterpreted.
The present paper aims to investigate the relationship between historians and Nuto Revelli’s book since the 1990s.
The primary sources for this research are professional historians’ essays and comments (both in academic reviews and in the mass media). However, the present article is not a history of historiography paper. This research aims to be a methodological analysis. On the one hand, it investigates whether and how historians appreciated Nuto Revelli’s strictly implicit method. On the other hand, it aims to advise to reread the investigations of this great witness and inquirer of his time attentively, and thus to fully develop and improve his methodology.
The paper is composed of three sections. In the first part, there is a concise description of the phases of Nuto Revelli’s work and their features and contents as well. The second part is the analysis of the attitude of the historians toward his researches. The third part focuses on the reception of Il disperse di Marburg and its value for historical research.
I libri di Nuto Revelli hanno fornito importanti contributi in termini sia di contenuti sia di metodo per numerose discipline. Anche per questo porre un'etichetta al suo lavoro (antropologo? sociologo? storico?) non è mai stato semplice. Soprattutto in seguito alla sua morte, avvenuta nel 2004, molti hanno riconosciuto esplicitamente l'importanza scientifica delle sue opere. In particolare, gli storici hanno dichiarato il valore delle sue ricerche nonché l'importanza di queste per alcuni campi di studio (in particolare la microstoria e la storia orale). Tuttavia, va segnalato come alcuni aspetti del suo lavoro siano rimasti misconosciuti, ignorati o fraintesi. Il presente articolo intende presentare una sintetica descrizione del rapporto degli storici con l'opera di Nuto Revelli dagli anni Novanta. Va da sé che le principali fonti per questa ricerca sono gli studi e i commenti (espressi anche in sedi non accademiche, come pubblicazioni divulgative o tramite mass media) dei professionisti della storia. Tuttavia, non intendo questo lavoro come una ricerca di storia della storiografia. Questa panoramica si propone piuttosto come una ricerca metodologica. O più correttamente: da una parte, è un'analisi su quanto e come il metodo (rigorosamente implicito) di Nuto Revelli sia stato apprezzato, fatto proprio e sviluppato dagli storici; dall'altra, vuole essere una proposta a rileggere il lavo-ro di questo grande testimone e indagatore del suo tempo, cercando di esplicitare appieno gli aspetti teoretici contenuti nel suo lavoro. L'articolo si compone di tre parti. Nella prima, cercherò di dare brevemente conto delle fasi e dei caratteri principali della produzione letteraria di Nuto Revelli, ponendo attenzione agli aspetti particolarmente significativi per questioni di natura teorica. Nella seconda trova spazio la presentazione dei principali atteggiamenti degli storici professionisti nei confronti dei suoi libri. L'ultima si concentra sulla ricezione de Il disperso di Marburg e sul suo valore per la ricerca storica.
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Il presente e la storia, 2018
There is a very harsh debate concerning the foibe, both in academic research and the public disco... more There is a very harsh debate concerning the foibe, both in academic research and the public discourse. The present paper aims to investigate the legislative process of the National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe. Such a law is an evidence of the bipartisan attitude of Italian politicians between late 1990s and early 2000s to build an official chauvinistic, self-pity, and self-acquitting narrative of the past. The subject of study testifies how some Neo-fascist and post-fascist narratives managed to became welcomed within the Republic’s official pantheon. The study uses manly records of the Parliament. The method of analysis is interdisciplinary: the paper investigates both historical and linguistic features. The paper is divided in three parts, namely: brief description of both the main features of the four law proposals and the political context in which they arose; analysis of the contents of the Parliamentary speeches; conclusions.
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Il presente e la storia, 2018
The present paper aims to investigate the narratives concerning Italian Resistance, Fascism, and ... more The present paper aims to investigate the narratives concerning Italian Resistance, Fascism, and anti-Fascism in cinema and television (both in public and private networks) between 2005 and 2015. The present paper is a public history investigation. The study focuses only on fiction programs for three reasons. First, documentaries are strictly connected to the academic research and their contents and interpretations are more often than not “new”, i.e. they are the outcomes of recent studies; therefore, documentaries are not a “mirror” of the average viewer’s historical consciousness. Second, documentaries are not a mass media product, as their viewers usually are more interested (and more taught) in the matter than the viewers of the fiction programs. Third, documentaries are less influenced than fiction by commercial criteria. The paper is divided in three parts. First, a brief excursus on the depictions of the Resistance in Italian cinema and television. Second, a description of the topics and the forms of cinema and TV-programs between the 60th and 70th anniversary of the Liberation with specific attention to the political and cultural contexts and their influences. Third, conclusions.
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Il presente e la storia, Dec 2017
Between the 1960s and the 1970s, anti-Fascism reached its peak of popularity and social consensus... more Between the 1960s and the 1970s, anti-Fascism reached its peak of popularity and social consensus. However, such a consensus was not unanimous, as there were two main anti-fascist narratives, which had two different political goals. On the one hand, the official celebrations and the Constitutional political parties described the Resistance as a patriotic struggle; on the other hand, the far left young militants supported the so-called «existential» anti-Fascism (i.e. anti-Fascism as a moral and life choice). These two narratives dueled even very harshly; however, in 1973 a documentary tried to melt and at the same time to go beyond them. Not only it successfully realized a more objective description of the Resistance, but also it is probably the most explicit example of a period during which, despite many problems, the anti-Fascism reached the largest popular support in Italian society
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Storia e problemi contemporanei, Jun 2017
The present paper aims to analyze the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Liberation. My... more The present paper aims to analyze the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Liberation. My goal is to show how the aforementioned celebrations did actually dismiss a topic that was central for the Italian identity since the very beginning of the Italian Republic. I am going to investigate this issue by both drawing a historical comparison between the 2015 celebrations and the public use of fascism-antifascism topic since mid-1970s, and conducting a content and rhetorical analysis of the public discourse during 2015 commemorations.
Since the mid-Seventies the antifascism paradigm, which was the established framework since 1960, was subjected to strong polemical attacks in the political and media debates. The dictatorial past and the civil war played a major role in public and political discourse: antifascist and anti-antifascist narratives clashed over the historical value of fascism and its duce, as well as over the Resistance and its actual value for the republican democracy. The debate grew so much in size and force that during the 60th anniversary, the antifascism paradigm substantially ceased to be the historical identity paradigm in the collective memory of the Country. In 2015, this topic disappeared almost completely, and it was replaced by celebrations built on weak historical identities, which have almost no explicit ideological content.
During the commemorations under investigation, public discoursed paid little or almost no attention to the past. The opposing concepts of fascism and antifascism were largely replaced with highly reconciled, weakly ideological reconstructions with almost no historical contents. Notwithstanding several commemoration events were organized and broadcasted through every means of communication, the issue of the actual relevance of antifascism identity was simply neglected (as most politicians did). Instead, the rhetorical instruments used in these events built up narratives in which there is no room for the past. In such a context, the ‘civil religion’ of the Resistance was replaced by celebrations characterized by vague values, such as ‘courage’ (as in the twitter campaign launched by the Government itself) or ‘liberty,’ without any bonds with the historical national roots, which were simply not mentioned (such as in the TV-show Viva il 25 aprile!).
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Il presente e la storia, Jun 2016
Italian colonial past receives a very little as well as distorted attention within the national c... more Italian colonial past receives a very little as well as distorted attention within the national collective memory. Such an experience has been almost removed and re-shaped by using self-acquitting rhetoric tools across various phases. At the end of this process, the national self-representation tends to forget this part of country’s historical legacy and at the same time colonial past is told through comforting and mushy telling, notwithstanding historians’ efforts in the last years.
The present paper is divided in two section. The first part contains a global historical reconstruction of the origin and evolution of such a process of self-absolution and general oblivion. The second section presents two case-of-study of non-academic history-telling actions, which aim to promote a deeper and more critical knowledge of Italian colonial past as well as its contemporary relevance.
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Book Reviews by Marco Bernardi
Il presente e la storia, 2018
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Il presente e la storia, 2018
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Il presente e la storia, Dec 2017
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Il presente e la storia, 2017
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Papers by Marco Bernardi
The interplay between history and politics raises critical questions: How do we choose to remember, and what does this say about our societal values and aspirations? As we examine the process of identity construction through the lens of the Foibe and Exodus, we invite readers to consider the profound impact of historical narratives in shaping our understanding of the present and future.
In these pages, I propose a study of two recent films, Er ist wieder da and Sono tornato, as an interesting source for enriching the framework of studies on how Italian and German societies use, reuse and judge their dictatorial past. The goal is to analyse (dis)continuities between the movies’ messages and the social attitudes toward the Nazi and Fascist past.
The contribution is both in Italian and German. It consists of three parts. In the first, I reconstruct briefly the forms and contents of the history of film and television representations of Fascism and Nazism with particular attention to their leaders. In the second, I analyse the main features and peculiarities of the two films. In the conclusions, I show how, although the products are almost identical in message and aesthetics, the national context determines two different interpretations concerning the actuality of the danger of neo-Nazism and neo-Fascism.
The present introduction is composed of two parts. First, it is a very brief history of the concept of deviance and the main types of study and branches of knowledge that dealt with the topic. Second, there is a very short summary of the thirteen chapters of the book.
The present paper inquires about the social success of the category of atavism within two newspapers with a large circulation between the mid-1860s and 1922 (La Stampa and Corriere della sera). The research aims to verify whether and how Lombroso’s ideas actually shaped Italian mass culture in Italy between the late XIX and early XX century. It is digital history research that employs tools borrowed from computer-assisted discourse studies (CADS).
http://www.eticapubblica.it/m-bernardi-un-anno-di-tweet-la-comunicazione-del-covid-19-da-parte-dei-politici-italiani-tramite-twitter/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/johs.12253
The present paper aims to investigate the relationship between historians and Nuto Revelli’s book since the 1990s.
The primary sources for this research are professional historians’ essays and comments (both in academic reviews and in the mass media). However, the present article is not a history of historiography paper. This research aims to be a methodological analysis. On the one hand, it investigates whether and how historians appreciated Nuto Revelli’s strictly implicit method. On the other hand, it aims to advise to reread the investigations of this great witness and inquirer of his time attentively, and thus to fully develop and improve his methodology.
The paper is composed of three sections. In the first part, there is a concise description of the phases of Nuto Revelli’s work and their features and contents as well. The second part is the analysis of the attitude of the historians toward his researches. The third part focuses on the reception of Il disperse di Marburg and its value for historical research.
I libri di Nuto Revelli hanno fornito importanti contributi in termini sia di contenuti sia di metodo per numerose discipline. Anche per questo porre un'etichetta al suo lavoro (antropologo? sociologo? storico?) non è mai stato semplice. Soprattutto in seguito alla sua morte, avvenuta nel 2004, molti hanno riconosciuto esplicitamente l'importanza scientifica delle sue opere. In particolare, gli storici hanno dichiarato il valore delle sue ricerche nonché l'importanza di queste per alcuni campi di studio (in particolare la microstoria e la storia orale). Tuttavia, va segnalato come alcuni aspetti del suo lavoro siano rimasti misconosciuti, ignorati o fraintesi. Il presente articolo intende presentare una sintetica descrizione del rapporto degli storici con l'opera di Nuto Revelli dagli anni Novanta. Va da sé che le principali fonti per questa ricerca sono gli studi e i commenti (espressi anche in sedi non accademiche, come pubblicazioni divulgative o tramite mass media) dei professionisti della storia. Tuttavia, non intendo questo lavoro come una ricerca di storia della storiografia. Questa panoramica si propone piuttosto come una ricerca metodologica. O più correttamente: da una parte, è un'analisi su quanto e come il metodo (rigorosamente implicito) di Nuto Revelli sia stato apprezzato, fatto proprio e sviluppato dagli storici; dall'altra, vuole essere una proposta a rileggere il lavo-ro di questo grande testimone e indagatore del suo tempo, cercando di esplicitare appieno gli aspetti teoretici contenuti nel suo lavoro. L'articolo si compone di tre parti. Nella prima, cercherò di dare brevemente conto delle fasi e dei caratteri principali della produzione letteraria di Nuto Revelli, ponendo attenzione agli aspetti particolarmente significativi per questioni di natura teorica. Nella seconda trova spazio la presentazione dei principali atteggiamenti degli storici professionisti nei confronti dei suoi libri. L'ultima si concentra sulla ricezione de Il disperso di Marburg e sul suo valore per la ricerca storica.
Since the mid-Seventies the antifascism paradigm, which was the established framework since 1960, was subjected to strong polemical attacks in the political and media debates. The dictatorial past and the civil war played a major role in public and political discourse: antifascist and anti-antifascist narratives clashed over the historical value of fascism and its duce, as well as over the Resistance and its actual value for the republican democracy. The debate grew so much in size and force that during the 60th anniversary, the antifascism paradigm substantially ceased to be the historical identity paradigm in the collective memory of the Country. In 2015, this topic disappeared almost completely, and it was replaced by celebrations built on weak historical identities, which have almost no explicit ideological content.
During the commemorations under investigation, public discoursed paid little or almost no attention to the past. The opposing concepts of fascism and antifascism were largely replaced with highly reconciled, weakly ideological reconstructions with almost no historical contents. Notwithstanding several commemoration events were organized and broadcasted through every means of communication, the issue of the actual relevance of antifascism identity was simply neglected (as most politicians did). Instead, the rhetorical instruments used in these events built up narratives in which there is no room for the past. In such a context, the ‘civil religion’ of the Resistance was replaced by celebrations characterized by vague values, such as ‘courage’ (as in the twitter campaign launched by the Government itself) or ‘liberty,’ without any bonds with the historical national roots, which were simply not mentioned (such as in the TV-show Viva il 25 aprile!).
The present paper is divided in two section. The first part contains a global historical reconstruction of the origin and evolution of such a process of self-absolution and general oblivion. The second section presents two case-of-study of non-academic history-telling actions, which aim to promote a deeper and more critical knowledge of Italian colonial past as well as its contemporary relevance.
Book Reviews by Marco Bernardi
The interplay between history and politics raises critical questions: How do we choose to remember, and what does this say about our societal values and aspirations? As we examine the process of identity construction through the lens of the Foibe and Exodus, we invite readers to consider the profound impact of historical narratives in shaping our understanding of the present and future.
In these pages, I propose a study of two recent films, Er ist wieder da and Sono tornato, as an interesting source for enriching the framework of studies on how Italian and German societies use, reuse and judge their dictatorial past. The goal is to analyse (dis)continuities between the movies’ messages and the social attitudes toward the Nazi and Fascist past.
The contribution is both in Italian and German. It consists of three parts. In the first, I reconstruct briefly the forms and contents of the history of film and television representations of Fascism and Nazism with particular attention to their leaders. In the second, I analyse the main features and peculiarities of the two films. In the conclusions, I show how, although the products are almost identical in message and aesthetics, the national context determines two different interpretations concerning the actuality of the danger of neo-Nazism and neo-Fascism.
The present introduction is composed of two parts. First, it is a very brief history of the concept of deviance and the main types of study and branches of knowledge that dealt with the topic. Second, there is a very short summary of the thirteen chapters of the book.
The present paper inquires about the social success of the category of atavism within two newspapers with a large circulation between the mid-1860s and 1922 (La Stampa and Corriere della sera). The research aims to verify whether and how Lombroso’s ideas actually shaped Italian mass culture in Italy between the late XIX and early XX century. It is digital history research that employs tools borrowed from computer-assisted discourse studies (CADS).
http://www.eticapubblica.it/m-bernardi-un-anno-di-tweet-la-comunicazione-del-covid-19-da-parte-dei-politici-italiani-tramite-twitter/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/johs.12253
The present paper aims to investigate the relationship between historians and Nuto Revelli’s book since the 1990s.
The primary sources for this research are professional historians’ essays and comments (both in academic reviews and in the mass media). However, the present article is not a history of historiography paper. This research aims to be a methodological analysis. On the one hand, it investigates whether and how historians appreciated Nuto Revelli’s strictly implicit method. On the other hand, it aims to advise to reread the investigations of this great witness and inquirer of his time attentively, and thus to fully develop and improve his methodology.
The paper is composed of three sections. In the first part, there is a concise description of the phases of Nuto Revelli’s work and their features and contents as well. The second part is the analysis of the attitude of the historians toward his researches. The third part focuses on the reception of Il disperse di Marburg and its value for historical research.
I libri di Nuto Revelli hanno fornito importanti contributi in termini sia di contenuti sia di metodo per numerose discipline. Anche per questo porre un'etichetta al suo lavoro (antropologo? sociologo? storico?) non è mai stato semplice. Soprattutto in seguito alla sua morte, avvenuta nel 2004, molti hanno riconosciuto esplicitamente l'importanza scientifica delle sue opere. In particolare, gli storici hanno dichiarato il valore delle sue ricerche nonché l'importanza di queste per alcuni campi di studio (in particolare la microstoria e la storia orale). Tuttavia, va segnalato come alcuni aspetti del suo lavoro siano rimasti misconosciuti, ignorati o fraintesi. Il presente articolo intende presentare una sintetica descrizione del rapporto degli storici con l'opera di Nuto Revelli dagli anni Novanta. Va da sé che le principali fonti per questa ricerca sono gli studi e i commenti (espressi anche in sedi non accademiche, come pubblicazioni divulgative o tramite mass media) dei professionisti della storia. Tuttavia, non intendo questo lavoro come una ricerca di storia della storiografia. Questa panoramica si propone piuttosto come una ricerca metodologica. O più correttamente: da una parte, è un'analisi su quanto e come il metodo (rigorosamente implicito) di Nuto Revelli sia stato apprezzato, fatto proprio e sviluppato dagli storici; dall'altra, vuole essere una proposta a rileggere il lavo-ro di questo grande testimone e indagatore del suo tempo, cercando di esplicitare appieno gli aspetti teoretici contenuti nel suo lavoro. L'articolo si compone di tre parti. Nella prima, cercherò di dare brevemente conto delle fasi e dei caratteri principali della produzione letteraria di Nuto Revelli, ponendo attenzione agli aspetti particolarmente significativi per questioni di natura teorica. Nella seconda trova spazio la presentazione dei principali atteggiamenti degli storici professionisti nei confronti dei suoi libri. L'ultima si concentra sulla ricezione de Il disperso di Marburg e sul suo valore per la ricerca storica.
Since the mid-Seventies the antifascism paradigm, which was the established framework since 1960, was subjected to strong polemical attacks in the political and media debates. The dictatorial past and the civil war played a major role in public and political discourse: antifascist and anti-antifascist narratives clashed over the historical value of fascism and its duce, as well as over the Resistance and its actual value for the republican democracy. The debate grew so much in size and force that during the 60th anniversary, the antifascism paradigm substantially ceased to be the historical identity paradigm in the collective memory of the Country. In 2015, this topic disappeared almost completely, and it was replaced by celebrations built on weak historical identities, which have almost no explicit ideological content.
During the commemorations under investigation, public discoursed paid little or almost no attention to the past. The opposing concepts of fascism and antifascism were largely replaced with highly reconciled, weakly ideological reconstructions with almost no historical contents. Notwithstanding several commemoration events were organized and broadcasted through every means of communication, the issue of the actual relevance of antifascism identity was simply neglected (as most politicians did). Instead, the rhetorical instruments used in these events built up narratives in which there is no room for the past. In such a context, the ‘civil religion’ of the Resistance was replaced by celebrations characterized by vague values, such as ‘courage’ (as in the twitter campaign launched by the Government itself) or ‘liberty,’ without any bonds with the historical national roots, which were simply not mentioned (such as in the TV-show Viva il 25 aprile!).
The present paper is divided in two section. The first part contains a global historical reconstruction of the origin and evolution of such a process of self-absolution and general oblivion. The second section presents two case-of-study of non-academic history-telling actions, which aim to promote a deeper and more critical knowledge of Italian colonial past as well as its contemporary relevance.
Since the Unity, different criminal stereotypes and more and more specific paradigms concerning the deviance arose from wishes for social control, specific needs connected to national history, and various criteria for social exclusions. In short, since the late XIX century, Italian society shows a growing need for picking out a criminal class whose members are various but more and more clearly defined. The confusion and eventually identification between the issue of the deviance and collective imagination was favor by collective prejudices, scientific debates, literature, newspapers fait divers columns, and the feuilletons. Such confusion involved and became very common also because of the fears and angsts that were associated with the changes in Italian society. The research aims to investigate and describe some paradigmatic images concerning the deviance, thus improving the understanding of such a complex phenomenon, which affects several problems, sources, and research fields.
The book investigates the topic of the public use of Fascism and anti-Fascism since the mid-1970s, combining public historical and communication research. More specifically, the research focuses on how Resistance’s legacy and history have been disseminated and in several cases, manipulated. Through the investigation of the public use of history, it is possible to know not only what and how Italian society remembered about the past, but also which were its values, as the narrative concerning the past always deals with the worries and interests of the community from which it arises. Besides, any tale on the past is a narrative. Therefore, the book aims to analyze how narratives and counter-narratives became hegemonic by investigating their specific rhetorical tools. These two methodologies can offer a particular description of Italian society during a period rich in social, economic, and political changes.