With the publication in 1913 of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) became one of the most famous, influential, and controversial historians in America.
“We have the sensation of being on the eve of an earthquake,” Corriere della Sera economics writer Dario Di Vico observed on the day of Italy’s elections in early March. The results would show that some 65 percent of the electorate was opposed to the political status quo represented chiefly by the center-left Partito Democratico of Matteo […]
George Scialabba spoke in the President’s Lecture Series at the University of Montana on Monday, 12 March. He gave this year’s Ezio Cappadocia Memorial Lecture in Politics and History in the series. An essayist and critic, Scialabba has a highly unusual background for an American intellectual. As a high school student and then at Harvard […]
If China, now the factory of the world, has been the biggest winner in the globalized economy, Italy has been one of its biggest losers. The Italian economy has suffered from low growth and rising levels of income inequality for the past twenty years. The global economic meltdown of 2008 made Italy’s already bad situation worse. As economics writer Dario Di Vico observes in his analysis of growing income inequality in Italy, “We risk entering a lasting regime of descending mobility: the [social] elevator is going down instead of ascending….”
Review of GIOVANNI MARIO CECI. Il terrorismo italiano: Storia di un dibattito. Giovanni Mario Ceci. Il terrorismo italiano: Storia di un dibattito. (Studi Storici Carocci, no. 199.) Rome, Italy: Carocci editore, 2013. Pp. 342. €35.00. By Richard Drake The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, 1 December 2017, Pages 1699–1700, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1699 Published: 11 December […]
The following article first appeared on The American Conservative on August 28, 2017. The suicide in the Friuli region of northern Italy earlier this year of a 30-year-old man, identified in the newspapers only as Michele, has become a symbol of the country’s unemployment tragedy, particularly as it affects young people. Though much worse in […]
The following review of The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire by Stephen Kinzer appeared in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, April 2017. That Stephen Kinzer, an outstanding foreign correspondent and world affairs columnist, had contemporary American foreign policy uppermost in mind when he wrote […]
The following article first appeared on The American Conservative on June 6, 2017. Italy’s Next Crisis Could Be Its Worst Anarchist violence and Muslim extremism might produce a near-failed state. Italy is not Greece. The latter is technically a failed state because of its overwhelming public and private indebtedness. But Italy is in […]
The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin published a review of The Education of an Anti-Imperialist on April 19, 2017 which I wanted to share here. A PDF version of the entire review can be read here. April 19, 2017 Review of The Education of an Anti-Imperialist Capital Times
ON March 2, 2017, The American Conservative magazine published an article “Fascism in the White House? Steve Bannon does not see America the way Julius Evola did.“
Here are links to two recent articles about Italian neo-fascist philosopher Julius Evola Both of these articles refer to research and writing I have done on Evola. His ideas have been a significant source of inspiration for the radical right in Europe and now have begun to attract increasing attention in the United States, particularly […]
The article Aldo Moro, l’Italia e l’impero americano by Richard Drake was published in Mondo Contemporaneo, n 1-2016. That article can be read (in the Italian) here. Link: http://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/Scheda_Rivista.aspx?IDArticolo=56625&Tipo=Articolo%20PDF&lingua=en&idRivista=136
From Tiempo devorado, Vol. 3, No 1 (2016): Bales per vots. Activisme i violència política a Europa des de 1991 ABSTRACT During the so-called years of lead, Italy had the highest rate of terrorist violence in the industrialized world. Terrorist groups, descending ideologically from the country’s Marxist Leninist and neofascist traditions, sought to destroy its democratic […]
Monday marks 100 years since the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France. With the then-secret agreement, they planned to divide up much of the Mideast between them at the end of World War I, which was still going on at the time. This post was the result of an interview conducted by accuracy.org, an independent media […]
The following Letter to the Editor appeared in the March 2016 102 (4) issue of the Journal of American History. To the Editor: “Interchange: World War I,” the online discussion in the September 2015 issue (pp. 463–99), raised many important points about the American experience in that conflict. The reasons given for American intervention in the […]
