Forty-Five Days: Emotion, Experience and Memory after Mussolini

My current book project, Forty-Five Days: Experience, Emotion and Memory after Mussolini, explores the collapse and aftermath of the Fascist regime, from the fall of Mussolini on July 25th, 1943 to the disintegration of the Italian state on September 8th. Drawing on sources ranging from police reports and censored letters to memoirs and radio broadcasts, I explore everyday experiences, relationships and behaviors. I look especially at acts of retributive violence, iconoclasm, and public protest to understand how individuals and communities confronted the unsettling legacies of the past twenty years. How did Italians narrate the past twenty years, to themselves and each other? What did Fascism - suddenly consigned to the past tense – mean to them, and how did they explain their own relationship to Mussolini's regime? ​​I am interested in how historical actors tried to condition how the regime, and the moment in which they were living, would be remembered by future generations, and how this in turn shaped postwar Italian memory politics. I also situate the Italian experience in terms of comparative cases ranging from postwar Germany to post-Soviet Eastern Europe to the contemporary Arab Spring. In December 2015, I presented some of my preliminary conclusions to the American Academy in Rome; you can watch the talk here.​ This book is currently under contract with Oxford University Press.

The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy: Outside the State?

​​I co-edited - with Michael Ebner (Syracuse University) and Kate Ferris (University of St. Andrews) - the volume Outside the State? The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Drawing inspiration from the Alltagsgeschichte school of scholarship on Nazi Germany, as well as related work on the Soviet Union by Sheila Fitzpatrick and others, the contributors seek to transcend elite-driven and cultural histories of the Italian dictatorship and present an account that stresses the experiences, subjectivities, and behaviors of ordinary Italians. At the same time, the volume moves beyond conventional social histories of the Fascist period, which are largely devoted to uncovering traces of anti-Fascist resistance and working-class solidarities. Fascism stayed in power for over two decades not only because of propaganda and repression, but also because of everyday interactions, relationships and compromises that often reinforced the regime’s totalitarian vision. Kate Ferris and I recently presented an overview of the project to the Graduate Seminar at NYU-Florence's Villa La Pietra; the video of our talk is available on their YouTube Channel.

Reviews of The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy

• "The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy is a thought-provoking, engaging, and eminently readable collection.... Alltagsgeschichte suggests promising new areas of inquiry in Italian historical studies while providing opportunities for cross-national comparisons with other totalitarian regimes."​ - Piero Garofalo, Modern Italy.
• "...la scuola dell’Alltagsgeschichte si distingue invece per la sua capacità di identificare proprio la politica anche in comportamenti della vita quotidiana che sembrano non aver nulla a che fare con essa.... questo volume arricchisce indubbiamente la nostra conoscenza del funzionamento del regime." - Paul Corner, Italia Contemporanea.

Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy

​My first book, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), examines the intersection of ideology, history and archeology, and the idea of Rome (romanità) under Mussolini's regime. Fascism's appropriation of the classical past should be understood not as an expression of its theatricality or retrograde tendencies, but rather as a literal and figurative excavation of modernity, an expression of the regime’s desire to regenerate and remake Italians through the Roman imperial virtues of discipline, hierarchy and harmony. Across several case studies – in historical scholarship, urban archaeology and museum display – the book explores the ways in which Fascist intellectuals approached the Eternal City as a blueprint for contemporary life and a source of dynamic values. This vision of modernity also transcended Italy’s borders, as the legacy of Rome’s “universal empire” provided a foundation for Fascism’s conception of a new European order and overseas empire.

Reviews of Excavating Modernity:

• "Arthurs does an excellent job in showing the debates and struggles between contrasting visions of Romanità in the 1938–1945 period.... In the end, Arthurs's book is an enormous contribution to our understanding of the fascist cultural project." - Paul Baxa, American Historical Review.
• "With Excavating Modernity, Joshua Arthurs has contributed a welcome analysis of the place of romanità - the vogue or cult of ancient Rome - in Fascist Italy. The import of this Fascist theme is well known, but as Arthurs emphasizes, it has long been taken as vacuous, atavistic, and dangerous.... Arthurs makes a distinctive contribution by relating romanità to current notions that Italian Fascism must be understood as revolutionary and modernizing." - David D. Roberts, Journal of Modern History.
• "Is there anything left to say about Fascist Italy's connections to the country's Roman past? Surprisingly enough, there is, and Joshua Arthurs's new book illustrates how non-party institutions configured the image of that past institutionally, outside of the party and regime propaganda machines.... Arthurs's narrative is crisp, lucid and rich with little-known and often unknown information. The particular accomplishment here is the detailed and thoughtful examination of seldom-studied institututions and the individuals who comprised them that were not explicitly fascist, but whose studies, exhibits, journals, and conferences cohered with the Regime." - Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, Canadian Journal of History.
• "That Italian fascism would adopt Rome as a fundamental part of its ideology, though it seems obvious now, was not a given at the start of the movement. As Joshua Arthurs notes, Rome was associated with the decadent liberal state and with the Catholic Church. Fascism, in contrast, meant modernity and dynamism.... Arthurs has given us an excellent, concise summary of what Rome meant to fascism. It is a valuable guide to scholars and to general readers." - Alexander De Grand, The Historian.