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. A section of the course will be devoted to the history of Postwar Italy since the end of Second World War to the present day.

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; Terrorism in Italy: essential features, main phases, American analyses and reactions; 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
- Tommaso Detti, Giovanni Gozzini, L’età del disordine. Storia del mondo attuale 1968-2017, Laterza, 2018
- Guido Formigoni, Storia essenziale dell'Italia repubblicana, Il Mulino, 2021

Main contents: The unification of Italy and the Europe of the Great Powers; the industrial revolution and the social question. the apogee of European power and the world; World War I and its consequences; totalitarianisms: Fascism, Bolshevism and Nazism; World War II; the Shoah, the bipolar world and the Cold War; decolonisation; the new republican Italy and its contradictions; USA and USSR; the gradual emergence of new protagonists: China, India; Africa and Latin America; the digital revolution; the collapse of communism and the new international order; post-communist societies; the European Union: construction and challenges; the new scenarios between the 20th and 21st centuries.

1) L. Caracciolo-A. Roccucci, Storia contemporanea, Le Monnier Università, Milano 2017; Marco Bresciani - Fulvio Conti (a cura di), L'età contemporanea. Prospettive di storia europea e globale, Roma, Carocci, 2023; Mark Mazower, Le ombre dell'Europa. Democrazie e totalitarismi nel XX secolo, Milano, Garzanti, 2019.