La Francia e la guerra d’Algeria. Il «Rapporto Stora» tra uso politico del passato e conflitti del presente
Andrea Brazzoduro
On 24 July 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned historian Benjamin Stora to report on the «questions regarding the memory of colonisation and the Algerian War». This article begins with an analysis of the report and its reception in France and Algeria, and it has two objectives. On the one hand, it examines the French debate on the memory of the Algerian War and colonization more generally. However, it also intervenes in a broader theoretical debate, asking whether memory studies have not unwittingly led to a discursive shift and replaced politics – understood as conflicts inscribed in social relations – with a distorted conception of «memory» as an ideology of «capitalist realism» (Fisher). To use the provocative title of a recent study (Gensburger and Lefranc, 2017), we might ask: are memory politics really useful? Do they shape reality?
Keywords: Algerian War; Emmanuel Macron; «Stora Report»; Memory.
Dal ghetto del Rinascimento alle smorfie di Mussolini. La storia culturale nella manualistica scolastica
Marco Rovinello
his article examines 38 high school history textbooks currently on the market to explore how they address the various themes and approaches typical of cultural history. It first considers the major factors that influence editorial projects, including guidelines from the Ministry of Education, marketing considerations, pedagogical training, and the relationship between public history and the teaching of history in schools. It then turns to the professional profiles of the textbook authors, along with the roles of the editors and publishing house consultants who edits the texts, select the images, and print the books. Finally, it looks at the cultural studies content, considering how certain topics make textbooks seem timelier, and therefore more appealing. However, the cultural approaches found in these textbooks neither question traditional hierarchies and periodisations nor complicate oversimplified histories and interpretations. In short, cultural history has made its way into Italian schools but, so far, its core methodological approaches have not.
Keywords: Textbooks; School; Cultural history; Research and pedagogy.
Tu chiamale, se vuoi, emozioni. Il radicalismo anarchico nell’Italia di fine Ottocento
Francesco Benigno
This chapter discusses three recent monographs (by M. Bucciantini, M. Manfredi and E. Papadia) that offer new insight on the Italian anarchist movement of the late 19th century. They do so by reconsidering its cultural dimensions, with particular emphasis on questions of identity, propaganda, and myths and symbols. In so doing, they draw on the historiographical trend currently in fashion in the Anglophone world, known as the history of emotions. The chapter highlights the concrete advantages of this approach in the question of Italian anarchist radicalism, along with its limitations.
Keywords: Anarchism; Socialism; Emotions; Radicalism.
Costituzione e storia costituzionale. La Repubblica di Weimar cento anni dopo
Monica Cioli
This article reconstructs some of the historiographical issues that emerge from different readings of the Weimar Republic. It begins with the earliest, classical studies, then considers the major established theses concerning the Republic, and then finally turns to the new lines of research that focus on the Weimar Constitution, or the «Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs» (the Constitution of the German Reich). Two studies, in particular, appeared on the centenary occasion to take stock of the state of the scholarship and offer new methodological perspectives. They agree regarding the significance of the «Reichsverfassung» (Constitution), but also underscore the need to reconsider the Weimar Republic, and historical phenomena in general, from an interdisciplinary and constitutional history perspective.
Keywords: Weimar Republic, Reichsverfassung, Constitutional history, Parliament.