Suchergebnisse

"The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it—first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture."

Next to the extinction of communism, nothing has disconcerted labor historians as much as the proliferation of cultural studies about mass consumption. By contrast, the critique of economism begun two decades ago under the influence of E. P. Thompson was a snap, for workers and themakingof the working class remained the main focus, even as emphasis shifted from workplace to community contests over pub life, public parks, and other arenas of popular culture. Cultural studies of mass consumption, however, challenge whether it is still valid, much less possible, to focus uniquely on workers, except perhaps to deal with theirunmakingas a class. Some are influenced by the "linguistic turn" associated with poststructuralism and deconstruction, putting pressure on labor historians to relate complex processes of signification to the changes in strategies and structures that are the meat and potatoes of the labor-history field.

The Feltrinelli Institute was founded in 1949 by the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – its aim "to promote the knowledge and study – carried out in accordance with strictly scientific criteria and complete ideological autonomy – of the history, the political and economic thought and the social ideas of the modern and contemporary eras; particular importance is to be given to Italy and to the economic phenomena, political doctrines and more historically important social movements of the country." Feltrinelli's initiative, which began with the library and a rich collection of materials on French socialism, was an important first step toward filling the vacuum in documentation and research on the Italian working class and socialist movements left by two decades of Fascist government. In the following years, the library and research activities of the Institute played a leading role in the reconstruction of intellectual life and political debate in Italy. Its publications, especially Movimento Operaio (1947–1955) and the Annali (1958-) contained some of the most important contributions to the study of the Italian working class and peasantry, and socialist movements made in the postwar period.

The Feltrinelli Institute was founded in 1949 by the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – its aim "to promote the knowledge and study – carried out in accordance with strictly scientific criteria and complete ideological autonomy – of the history, the political and economic thought and the social ideas of the modern and contemporary eras; particular importance is to be given to Italy and to the economic phenomena, political doctrines and more historically important social movements of the country." Feltrinelli's initiative, which began with the library and a rich collection of materials on French socialism, was an important first step toward filling the vacuum in documentation and research on the Italian working class and socialist movements left by two decades of Fascist government. In the following years, the library and research activities of the Institute played a leading role in the reconstruction of intellectual life and political debate in Italy. Its publications, especially Movimento Operaio (1947–1955) and the Annali (1958-) contained some of the most important contributions to the study of the Italian working class and peasantry, and socialist movements made in the postwar period.

Im Juni 1926 war Rom Schauplatz eines spektakulären gesellschaftlichen Ereignisses. Gefeiert wurde eine "faschistische Hochzeit", Trauzeuge Mussolini inklusive. Vor den Altar traten Lilliana Weinman, gefeierte amerikanische Opernsängerin aus einer jüdischen Industriellenfamilie, und Attilio Teruzzi, hochdekorierter Kriegsveteran, Teilnehmer beim Marsch auf Rom, mitleidloser Anführer der Schwarzhemden und Archetyp des "neuen starken Mannes". Aber bald schon fühlte sich der virile Gatte von der Unabhängigkeit seiner Frau in der Ehre verletzt und forderte die Scheidung - nur dachten seine Frau und die katholische Kirche gar nicht daran, dem zuzustimmen. Die Zwangsehe wird für den Aufsteiger Teruzzi zusehends zum Problem, kündigen sich am Horizont doch die ersten antisemitischen Gesetze des faschistischen Staates an.Mit Seitenblicken auf Literatur, Mode, Stadtwelten und Liebesverhältnisse entfaltet die renommierte Historikerin Victoria de Grazia ein opulentes, fesselnd erzähltes Gesellschaftsepos, das das kulturelle Klima der Epoche greifbar werden lässt. Sie zeigt, wie Mussolinis Bewegung ihre Revolution bis in die zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen forcierte. Und sie macht die Bedingungen für Aufstieg und Fall des "perfekten Faschisten" anschaulich: die Entwicklung eines Mannes des Mittelmaßes in einer Zeit der Extreme

Im Juni 1926 war Rom Schauplatz eines spektakulären gesellschaftlichen Ereignisses. Gefeiert wurde eine "faschistische Hochzeit", Trauzeuge Mussolini inklusive. Vor den Altar traten Lilliana Weinman, gefeierte amerikanische Opernsängerin aus einer jüdischen Industriellenfamilie, und Attilio Teruzzi, hochdekorierter Kriegsveteran, Teilnehmer beim Marsch auf Rom, mitleidloser Anführer der Schwarzhemden und Archetyp des "neuen starken Mannes". Aber bald schon fühlte sich der virile Gatte von der Unabhängigkeit seiner Frau in der Ehre verletzt und forderte die Scheidung - nur dachten seine Frau und die katholische Kirche gar nicht daran, dem zuzustimmen. Die Zwangsehe wird für den Aufsteiger Teruzzi zusehends zum Problem, kündigen sich am Horizont doch die ersten antisemitischen Gesetze des faschistischen Staates an.Mit Seitenblicken auf Literatur, Mode, Stadtwelten und Liebesverhältnisse entfaltet die renommierte Historikerin Victoria de Grazia ein opulentes, fesselnd erzähltes Gesellschaftsepos, das das kulturelle Klima der Epoche greifbar werden lässt. Sie zeigt, wie Mussolinis Bewegung ihre Revolution bis in die zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen forcierte. Und sie macht die Bedingungen für Aufstieg und Fall des "perfekten Faschisten" anschaulich: die Entwicklung eines Mannes des Mittelmaßes in einer Zeit der Extreme