Suchergebnisse

The course of Italian Legal History carried out by Cesare Nani at the University of Turin from 1878 to 1899 can be reconstructed, in method and content, through the notes of the lessons collected by his students and collaborators. This contribution, which aims to present the first results of a research yet to be completed, outlines the main lines of this course and also frames Nani's teaching activity in the context of his time. To this end, it traces the subsequent reforms introduced in university legislation after Italian unification, with specific attention to the provisions concerning the teaching of legal history and the effects that they had on the construction of the identity of the discipline and on the creation of suitable teaching tools.

This handbook suggests a global, transnational perspective on the history of education as a field. Apart from an introductory chapter written by the editors, the text includes 36 articles divided into six parts. Each article describes a subject in the field and ends with a bibliography for further reading. As repeatedly stressed in the book, this field has developed since the early nineteenth century with the emergence of the modern nation-state. Its scope and content expanded and underwent some transformations since the 1960s with the introduction of new perspectives, issues, and methods through interaction with the discipline of history and the broader social sciences.

The problem of truth, from the point of view of a historian, arises in clearly different forms compared to those of scientists and probably also of social scholars of other disciplines. History is a narration of past events, but this narration is subject to an arbitrary selection of its parts, its documentation, the facts that make up the event under discussion. History is organized on the basis of documents, testimonies and biographical elements, but also of considerations on the structures of power, on the articulations of society and on the forms of political regimes. As the history of the 1900s amply demonstrates – of which the Shoah and the Nazi destruction of the Jews as well as Soviet communism, the history of Italy and McCarthyism in the United States, as well as the genocides of the 1990s, are touched on in this article – the interpretation of the events involved the greatest difficulty in identifying a recognized and shared truth.

The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, founded in 1775 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo d'Asburgo Lorena, is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific museums in the world. The fourth volume on the Collections of the Mineralogy and Lithology Section, published like the previous volumes by the Firenze University Press, fits perfectly in the series dedicated to the collections of the University's Museum System. The first part of the book describes in great detail the paths that led to the formation of the collections, starting with those dating to the Medici period and arriving at the specimens collected during recent expeditions. The second part illustrates and documents the extraordinary specimens of minerals, hardstone carvings and meteorites which represent the material patrimony of this section. Particular attention is given to the holotypes, the Elban Collection and the minerals of pegmatites, as well as the methods and solutions adopted to realize the project of the new museum exhibition set-up. The third and last part describes the studies carried out on the materials: from the minerals of the systematic collections to the rock specimens that recount not only the geodiversity of a region but also the history of a city.