This is a study of the early writings of Virginio Gayda (1885-1944), a talented but amoral Italian journalist whose career spanned two world wars. A keen observer, prolific writer and propagandist during his stint as the newspaper La Stampa’s special correspondent in Habsburg Vienna, Gayda lent his considerable skills to promote an aggressive foreign policy. No one did more than he to poison relations between the Italian and Yugoslav peoples. His is the story of a respected journalist who chose an ultranationalist path to fascism and international fame. Not uninfluenced by rank careerism and material reward he forsook his roots to embrace the antisemitic “race” laws of 1938 and Italy’s disastrous partnership with Nazi Germany.

Originally part of the Woolfs' personal library, the Leonard and Virginia Woolf Collection at Washington State University reveals valuable biographical information about the Woolfs themselves, as well as writers and artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group. The catalog consists of brief citations that describe all of the circa 6,000 volumes in the repository.

This book explores the motives, preparation, objectives, contact and consequences of Italy's war of 1940, which ended the country's role as a great power and reduced it to the status of first among Germany's satellites. What Professor Knox demonstrates is the limits of Mussolini's power. In particular, thanks to exhaustive research in the relevant archives, he has been able to throw important new light on Mussolini's relations with his military advisers and commanders.

History. Philip V. Cannistraro is Distinguished Professor of Italian American Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Philip Cannistraro is the leading American historian of Italian Fascism. He uses his profound knowledge of Italian and American archival sources to examine the ways Mussolini and the Fascist movement used and were used by Italian-American sympathizers during the 1920's and how these connections reached new levels of complexity at the beginning of the 1930's. Cannistraro's work is a model study which successfully brings together Italian American and Italian history in ways that enrich both fields --Alexander De Grand.

Major theme: Italian adaptation to and conflict with the host society.

In the heart of Rome beside the Capitol, confronting the Piazza Venezia, stands the Victor Emmanuel monument. In Rome, which until 1945 was so often accorded the adjectives 'eternal' or 'imperial', the monumentissimo (as sardonic socialists labelled it) is the most public, most theatrical and most excessive architectural celebration of post-Risorgimento Italian patriotism, nationalism and perhaps imperialism. This book asks why the Victor Emmanuel monument, planned after 1878 and opened in 1911, was a structure raised by Liberal and not Fascist Italy. Through a detailed study of diplomacy, of policy-making, of policy-makers, and of the distribution of real power in pre-First World War Italy, it demonstrates how important foreign policy, and a foreign policy of greatness, was to Liberal Italy. Weakened by economic backwardness, regional diversity, and the gulf between the legal-political world and 'real' society, Liberal Italy was nonetheless ambitious to be a Great Power. This monograph contributes to a number of major historiographical debates. It produces evidence which casts doubts on the thesis that fascism was a parenthesis in Italian history.

Oswald Mosley was an English aristocrat who made his mark on British politics as the founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists. A man of intellect and determination, he rebelled against the establishment of his day. He rejected the authority of those who he believed acted not as shepherds of their people but their false friends, decrepit and slinking middle managers for international capital and finance. James Drennan's B.U.F. Oswald Mosley and British Fascism is an internal history of the British Union of Fascists which describes Mosley's dramatic journey across the English political spectrum, culminating at the formation of Britain's foremost Fascist movement. It delves into contemporary politics, condemning the political class with dry, acrid wit; and into English history, describing the ruin brought by the rise of capitalism and democracy. Drennan describes Fascism as a spiritually "pan-European movement," representing equally "an economic revolt against the obsolete capitalist system, and a spiritual reaction against the materialist and internationalist concepts of Marxism." It was, in his analysis, the heroic challenge of the men of his age to the "pessimism" of Spengler, an elite effort of the European civilization to overcome its prophesied twilight and create a new and better world. The fact that in 1934 such predictions could be made, dazzling in their unalloyed hope and confidence, appear all the more tragic in hindsight, but the legacy of the men described in this book will not be forgotten.