TALK: Friends of the Library talk (and AGM)

**This talk will be preceded by the Annual General Meeting at 7.30pm**

This talk will explore how Italians from many parts of society lived a generation of dictatorial rule. The Fascist regime was the first to deploy the word totalitarian and, by the 1930s, it was boasting that it was creating 'new Fascist men and women' through what some historians have later labelled a cultural revolution. Professor Bosworth’s new book, Mussolini's Italy: life under the dictatorship (London: Allen Lane, 2005), however, stresses that, while there can be little doubt about Fascist evil - Mussolini's regime caused at least one million premature deaths - nonetheless Fascist totalitarianism never turned Italians into 'Mussolini's willing executioners' and only that. Instead, many Italians, not excluding Mussolini and other Fascist bosses, sought to adapt the meaning of Fascism to fit their existing comprehension of such matters as the family, Catholicism, patron-client relations and regional difference. In his paper, with some reference to bees, poison gas, a drunken builders' labourer named Boccaccio and toys, Professor Bosworth will exhibit some of the multiple histories which, even under a malign and 'modern' dictatorship, continued to eddy through Italian lives.

About the Speaker

Professor Richard Bosworth is Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and an active researcher over a range of modern Italian social and political history, historiography and migration studies. He is the author or editor of 20 books, and more than 50 academic articles, numerous chapters and reviews. In the last decade Professor Bosworth has held a series of visiting fellowships and professorships in such places as Balliol and All Souls Colleges, Oxford, St. John’s and Clare Hall Colleges, Cambridge, the Casa Italiana at Columbia University New York and the University of Trento in Italy. He will be a visiting professor at the University of Siena in April-June 2006. Professor Bosworth has a series of current research projects with the two most important being (i) a commissioned book for Yale University Press on Rome and its histories 1750-2000 and (ii) an edited Handbook on Fascism for Oxford University Press.

Members: FreeNon-members: $5.00 donation