Doing Italian history: Pleasure and politics

This is the second part of a general historiographical review of recent studies on the formation of a modern Italian nation and national identities. The review is organized chronologically, and this second part covers literature on the development of the Italian state and society from Fascism to the birth of the Republic. Si tratta della seconda parte di una articolo dedicato al tema del proceso di 'nation and state building' e modernizzazione in Italia, con particolare attenzione per i temi della costruzione della macchina statale e dell'identità nazionale. La prima parte si era soffermata sul periodo risorgimentale e sull'Italia liberale fino alla prima guerra mondiale e all'avvento del regime fascista. L'articolo tenta di ricostruire in maniera critica i nuovi contributi interpretativi di un dibattito come quello sul processo di costruzione dello stato nazionale unitario, che di recente sembra essersi riacceso, collocandoli nel solco di una tradizione storiografica sul tema, oramai consolidata. Accanto a questa, infatti, sembra farsi strada una nuova stagione di studi, molto meno ancorata al peso che per lungo tempo hanno esercitato i differenti condizionamenti ideologici. In questa seconda parte vengono analizzate le interpretazioni storiografiche, basate su nuove ricerche recentemente condotte, sul ventennio fascista e sulla nascità e lo sviluppo dell'Italia Repubblicana.     

Reading Federico Chabod's Storia dell'idea d'Europa half a century later

Federico Chabod was one of Italy's most respected historians in a period that ran from the late 1920s down to the 1950s, and hence was an important intellectual protagonist in the intellectual culture of both Fascist and post-Second World War Italy. In this article Stuart Woolf re-examines Chabod's intellectual itinerary in both these periods, and focuses in particular on the course of lectures on the idea of Europe that Chabod gave in 1943-4 and 1958-9 (the latter were published in 1961 as the Storia dell'idea d'Europa). Like Marc Bloch's Etrange défaite, Woolf argues that Chabod's reflections on the idea of Europe and the role of Europe in world history were symptomatic of the response of a minority of committed intellectuals to the disasters of two world wars. The author sets Chabod's arguments in the context of debates on the nature of Europe and its historical role both before and after the Second World War, and offers a critical retrospective evaluation of Chabod's conclusions.     

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

A Descriptive Analysis of Discrete U.S. Industrial Complexes*

Abstract. We use the Getis/Ord local G statistic and detailed county‐level industry employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to isolate discrete industrial complexes—or groups of nominally linked industries clustered in particular locations—for two recent years: 1989 and 1997. We describe the characteristics of the complexes in terms of their number, spatial extent, broad regional distribution, and other factors. Data from the two periods help illustrate key shifts in industrial locations, including the continuing concentration of the apparel industry in the Southeast and the ongoing southern shift in U.S. vehicle production.