Università Roma Tre

The course aims at providing a basic understanding of the crucial turning points and most relevant processes of cultural, economic, institutional, political and social transformation of contemporary history.

Main contents: The First World War and its consequences; The Age of Totalitarianism; The Second World War; The Holocaust; The Cold War: main phases; The process of decolonization; The economic boom and the affluent society; Postwar Italy: centrismo, Center-Left, national solidarity and pentapartito; The “Shock of the Global” and its effects on the political, economic, institutional, cultural and social sphere; The digital revolution; The collapse of Communism and the new international order after the Cold War; The evolution of the political system in Italy after the collapse of the “Republic of the parties”; Politics in the XX century and its evolution. The State, the parties and the Welfare State: apogee and crisis; New scenarios and challenges in the XXI century.

- Giovanni Sabbatucci, Vittorio Vidotto, Storia contemporanea. Dalla Grande Guerra a oggi, Laterza, nuova edizione del 2019
- Paolo Pombeni, Lo stato e la politica. Quanto contano nel mondo globale di oggi, Il Mulino, nuova edizione aggiornata 2020
- Tommaso Detti, Giovanni Gozzini, L’età del disordine. Storia del mondo attuale 1968-2017, Laterza, 2018

The course has two parts:
A) the first is an introduction to historical knowledge, its methodological issues and its political use. It examines the overarching phenomena of the contemporary age with their interpretative challenges.
B) the second, more specialised, looks in depth at Italy's political history in twentieth century.

- G. SABBATUCCI – V. VIDOTTO, Storia contemporanea. L’Ottocento, Roma-Bari, Laterza (no cap. I-IV)
- G. SABBATUCCI – V. VIDOTTO, Storia contemporanea. Dalla Grande Guerra ad oggi, Roma-Bari, Laterza
- S. CAVAZZA – P. POMBENI (a cura di), Introduzione alla storia contemporanea, Bologna, Il Mulino
- G. FORMIGONI, Storia essenziale dell’Italia repubblicana, Bologna, Il Mulino