scholarly journals Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Roberta Biasillo ◽  
Claudio de Majo ◽  
Daniele Valisena
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
Italian Diaspora ◽  
European Migration

Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

scholarly journals On Italian mobilities and ecological fretwork

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Stephanie Malia Hom
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
History Of Migration

This invited commentary explores the ecological fretwork binding people and nature, and, specifically, how Italy and Italianness serve as critical frames for envisioning an environmental history of migration. It examines how each contribution in this special issue adds rigorous archival research to the growing body of academic literature on Italy and the environmental humanities. It also comments on the future research directions, which are connected to this emerging history. Situating these contributions in the wider context of climate change and planetary transformation, this article illuminates how mobilities, understood as an Italian phenomenon, have shaped the globe on a scale previously unknown.

A tale of two plains: migrating landscapes between Italy and Argentina 1870–1955

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Daniele Valisena ◽  
Antonio Canovi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
South American ◽  
Po Plain ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Environmental Transformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration

This article offers an analysis of the encounter between the two natural environments of the Italian Po Plain and the Argentinian Pampa Gringa through the migration of Italian rural workers. Notably, we focus on the migration micro-histories of Emiliano-Romagnoli, who moved from Italy to Argentina during Italian Great Migration Era (1870–1955). Building on oral histories gathered in Italy and Argentina between 2005 and 2007, these micro-histories show how place-based landscapes of Italianness hybridised with the local landscape of the South American plains through Italian migrants’ embodied memories, labour, and socio-environmental transformation practices. By focusing on Po Plain migrants’ memories and experiences of the lowlands of northern Italy and the Argentinian pampas, we aim to offer a micro-historical perspective on the environmental history of migration.

Scaling Up

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-324
Author(s):  
Robert M. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Edition ◽  
Usable Past ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Point Of Departure

To introduce this special issue of Social Science History, my essay sketches the historiographical context out of which grew Joachim Radkau's (2008) bookNature and Power: A Global History of the Environment(German edition 2002 [2000]). It notes a few of the problems that Radkau and other historians face when undertaking a solo synthesis of research mainly at the local and regional levels. In addition to the issues of selecting themes, geographic extent, and temporal depth, questions of purpose have to be considered. Should global environmental history devote itself to producing a usable past for policies of the present and future? Should it, rather, take a prospective approach to reconstruct environmental thinking and practice as it was in a previous time, the better to identify unintended consequences and ambiguities in the historical past and to avoid presentism and anachronism while recognizing that history offers teachable moments? Radkau hews more to the second of these approaches than to the first, and his book provides the focus and a point of departure for the rest of the essays in the issue.

Introduction: Missionary Encounters in the Atlantic World

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Gerbner ◽  
Karin Vélez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the African diaspora, and the history of capitalism. While missionary sources are used widely, most scholarship on the encounters themselves focuses on either a particular denomination or a particular region. Rarely is the surprisingly cohesive barrier between Protestant and Catholic missions breached within single volumes or monographs. This special issue seeks to break down these divides. By making inter-denominational and inter-imperial connections, this volume asks new questions about the meaning of missionary encounters in the early modern world.

scholarly journals Editorial

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-121
Author(s):  
Robert Mason
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Mobile Populations ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
Cultural Belonging

This special issue of Queensland Review is focused on the long history of migration in regional Queensland. It integrates analysis by historians and social scientists to explore the continuities and changes that have characterised Queenslanders’ lives outside the metropolitan centre of Brisbane. Together, the articles reveal how mobile populations and cultural belonging have been negotiated, and continue to be negotiated, in regional Queensland.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

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