EUROPEAN AND ITALIAN HISTORY FROM 1914 TO PRESENT

The course aims to provide students with general knowledge about contemporary European and Italian history. Furthermore, the course will help the students to improve a critical and autonomous approach, especially in front of both analytical and interpretive studies. In this way, the course will prepare students to attend any bachelor’s degree.

The first outcome of the course is to give the students a global overview of the most crucial events which occurred in Italy and more in general, in Europe from 1914 onwards. At the same time, the
course does not aim to offer an exclusively event-driven analysis, on the contrary, its second outcome will be to offer a general knowledge of the most significant political and cultural phenomena which affected European history. By focusing mainly on the democratic culture, its history and its difficulty in being predominant in the entire European continent, the course will help the student to understand how history is not at all a linear and coherent process. By focusing on Italian history, the course will provide the students with a better understanding of the social, political and cultural context where they live. Since a significant amount of hours of the course will be consecrated to group discussion and team working's activities, another important outcome will be to enhance students’ abilities to work together. Students will also become more familiar with public presentations and will improve their skills to summarize texts (such as articles and chapters of books, but also archival sources) and put into
question the thesis developed by the authors.

No one in particular, except basic knowledge of some pillars of European history such as the French Revolution, WWI, and WWII.

If the course aims to give a general overview of the political, economic, cultural and social events which occurred in Europe from 1914 to the present with a permanent focus on Italian contemporary history, the program will look, with particular attention, at the history of democracy in Europe and Italy. How has been the democratic culture put into question over the course of the twentieth century? How was fascism able to take root in Italy and elsewhere? How, on the contrary, since 1945 was democratic culture able to regain consensus in Italy as elsewhere? How did different stages of the Cold War, political violence, students’ activism, and Populism affect democracy? All these will be the main important questions that the course will deal with in order to think about the current geopolitical scenario in a critical way.

C. Duggan, "A concise history of Italy" (Cambridge: 1994);
P. Ginsborg, "A history of contemporary Italy : society and politics, 1943-1988" (London: 1990);
M. Mazower, "Dark Continent: Europe’s twentieth century" (London: 2018);

There will be a Mid-term test (multiple choice questions)
Final assessment: presentation of a paper (week 13 and 14) and/or writing of an essay (I will give all the details soon)

The teaching methods will be the following (more or less equally divided over the course of each lesson):
- Lectures;
- Exercises (Q&A sessions);
- Group Discussions (starting from lectures and questions).

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "International cooperation" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development