Reframing Irish Youth in the Sixties focuses on the position of youth in the Republic of Ireland at a time when the meaning of youth was changing internationally. It argues that the reformulation of youth as a social category was a key element of social change. While emigration was the key youth issue of the 1950s, in this period young people became a pivotal point around which a new national project of economic growth hinged. Transnational ideas and international models increasingly framed Irish attitudes to young people's education, welfare and employment. At the same time, Irish youths were participants in a transnational youth culture that appeared to challenge the status quo. This book examines the attitudes of those in government, the media, in civil society organisations and religious bodies to youth and young people, addressing new manifestations of youth culture and new developments in youth welfare work. In using youth as a lens, this book takes an innovative approach that enables a multi-faceted examination of the sixties, providing fresh perspectives on key social changes and cultural continuities.

Contributors to this issue approach the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the experiments of the revolutionary period as events that opened new possibilities for politics that remain vital one hundred years later. The essays highlight how those events not only affected Russia and Europe but led to the emergence of a new political image of the world and a profound rethinking of Marxist traditions. This issue globalizes the 1917 revolution, emphasizing its echoes throughout the world and the parallel development of political possibilities beyond Russia. Topics include the Soviets from the revolution to the present, the impact of the revolution in Latin America, the work of the legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis analyzed through the lens of the revolution, anarchist imaginaries, and the historicizing of communism. Contributors. Giso Amendola, Martin Bergel, Kathy Ferguson, Michael Hardt, Wang Hui, Artemy Magun, John MacKay, Sandro Mezzadra, Antonio Negri, Enzo Traverso

This book explores the impact of violence on the religious beliefs of front soldiers and civilians in Germany during the First World War. The central argument is that religion was the main prism through which men and women in the Great War articulated and processed trauma. Inspired by trauma studies, the history of emotions, and the social and cultural history of religion, this book moves away from the history of clerical authorities and institutions at war and instead focuses on the history of religion and war 'from below.' Jason Crouthamel provides a fascinating exploration into the language and belief systems used by ordinary people to explain the inexplicable. From Judeo-Christian traditions to popular beliefs and 'superstitions,' German soldiers and civilians depended on a malleable psychological toolbox that included a hybrid of ideas stitched together using prewar concepts mixed with images or experiences derived from the surreal environment of modern combat. Perhaps most interestingly, studying the front experience exposes not only lived religion, but also how religious beliefs are invented. Front soldiers in particular constructed new, subjective spiritual and religious concepts based on encounters with industrialized weapons, the sacred experience of comradeship, and immersion in mass death, which profoundly altered their sense of self and the supernatural. More than just a coping mechanism, religious language and beliefs enabled victims, and perpetrators, of violence to narrate concepts of psychological renewal and rebirth. In the wake of defeat and revolution, religious concepts shaped by the war experience also became a cornerstone of visions for radical political movements, including the National Socialists, to transform a shattered and embittered German nation. Making use of letters between soldiers and civilians, diaries, memoirs and front newspapers, Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War offers a unique glimpse into the belief systems of men and women at a turning point in European history.

In the wake of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett wrote some of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. This is the first full-length historical study to examine the far-reaching impact of the war on Beckett's creative and intellectual sensibilities. Drawing on a substantial body of archival material, including letters, manuscripts, diaries and interviews, as well as a wealth of historical sources, this book explores Beckett's writing in a range of political contexts, from the racist dogma of Nazism and aggressive traditionalism of the Vichy regime to Irish neutrality censorship and the politics of recovery in the French Fourth Republic. Along the way, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War casts new light on Beckett's political commitments and his concepts of history as they were formed during Europe's darkest hour.

When Hitler s armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind s greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire.

On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these historic riches. In May 1944 two unlikely American heroes artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli. With the German army retreating up the Italian peninsula, orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi government to transport truckloads of art north across the border into the Reich. Standing in the way was General Karl Wolff, a top-level Nazi officer. As German forces blew up the magnificent bridges of Florence, General Wolff commandeered the great collections of the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace, later risking his life to negotiate a secret Nazi surrender with American spymaster Allen Dulles.

Brilliantly researched and vividly written, the New York Times bestselling Saving Italy brings readers from Milan and the near destruction of The Last Supper to the inner sanctum of the Vatican and behind closed doors with the preeminent Allied and Axis leaders: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Churchill; Hitler, Goring, and Himmler.

An unforgettable story of epic thievery and political intrigue, Saving Italy is a testament to heroism on behalf of art, culture, and history."