Università Roma Tre

Students must have a previous good knowledge of the events of contemporary history from 1815 to the present.

The course is divided in two parts:
a) the first is basic and it is devoted to an historical introduction to the contemporary world
b) the second is more advanced and it is devoted to the history of Italy in the Cold War

PART ONE (6 CFU)
This part introduces to the history of 19th and 20th Century, to methodological issues (periodization, political use of history, memory, sources), to the greatest phenomena (revolutions and political ideas, industrial development, mass society), and to the main historical interpretations of contemporary world.
Main topics: 1. Introduction to Historical Knowledge 2. The Contemporary Age: An Appraisal looking from the Today World 3. The Demographic Revolution 4. The Industrial and Environmental Revolution 5. The Communication Revolution 6. The Cultural Revolution: The Individual and the spread of culture 7. The Social Revolution: Peasants, Workers, Middle Class, Women 8. The Political Revolutions 9. The Rise of Contemporary “Political Sphere”: Reactionaries, Conservatives, Liberals, Radicals, Socialists 10. Nationalism: Unification in Italy and Germany 11.The Role of Religion: Secularization and De-Christianization 12. The Age of Modernization Begins 13. A Second Acceleration of Progress. The Second Industrial Revolution 14. The Birth of Mass Society 15. Colonial Imperialism 15. Reshaping Europe: The Surfacing of America and Asia 16. World War I 17. The Age of Totalitarianisms: Crisis of Democracy and Economic Collapse 18. Bolshevik Communism 19. Fascism 20. Nazism 21. World War II 22. The Cold War 23. Decolonization and Third World 24. The Origins of Welfare 25. The Affluent Society 26. A Post-Modern Age?

PART TWO (2 CFU)
This part introduces to the political history of contemporary Italy and to her deep connection with Cold War bipolarity: from the break of the Anti-Fascist Alliance in 1947 to the «nationa solidarity« governments of the 1970s.
Main topics: 1. National and International Dimension in the «Total» Cold War 2. The Heritage of Fascism and War (1943-1946) 3. The Birth of the Italian Political System and the Beginning of Cold War (1947-1949) 4. The Conflicts of the Centrismo Age (1950-1955) 5. Beyond Centrismo (1956-1961) 6. Peaceful Coexistence and Center-Left (1962-1968) 7. The Years of the «Strategy of Tension» and of the Crisis of the West (1969-1973) 8. «National Solidarity » (1974-1978)

Part One
○ G. SABBATUCCI – V. VIDOTTO, Storia contemporanea. L’Ottocento, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2017, pp. 418 (with the exception of chapters I-IV)
○ G. SABBATUCCI – V. VIDOTTO, Storia contemporanea. Il Novecento, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2017, pp. 488

Part Two
○ S. CAVAZZA – P. POMBENI, Introduzione alla storia contemporanea, Bologna, Il Mulino 2012, pp. 456 (the book is available also in the online Pandoracampus platform, with supplementary resources, and interactive contents)

The acquisition of tools needed to understand the XIX and XX centuries will be realized through a programme divided in three parts.
In the first one, with the aid of the history manual, the basic knowledge about the development of contemporary world, about the main processes of cultural, economic, political, institutional and social transformations will be acquired. This part will also describe the key turning points and some historiographical junctions. In the second part the analysis will focus on WW1, its global dimension as watershed between the 19th and the 20th century. In the third part the study will deal with the elaboration of the idea of peace, as put forward by pacifist movements, in particular the women’s pacifism, and how it held before the deflagration of the conflict.
The acquired knowledge, verified in the relevant exams, should give evidence of the critical ability in understanding the complexity of problems the relevance of specific aspects of events in the 19th and 20th centuries. For those who attended the lessons there will be a written test valid to pass the first part of the exam, namely the one based on the study of the manual.

Giovanni Sabbatucci e Vittorio Vidotto, Contemporary History. XIX Century (excluding chapters I-IV), Laterza ed.
Giovanni Sabbatucci e Vittorio Vidotto, Contemporary History. XX Century, Laterza ed.
Oliver Janz, 1914-1918. The Great War, Einaudi
Stefania Bartoloni, Women before the Great War. Peace, Rights, Democracy (1978-1918), Laterza