Product Description: The Vatican's opening of its archives in 2006 for the period of the papacy of Pius XI (1922-1939) has prompted a burst of historical research which is not only shedding new light on the role of the Holy See and the Church in this period of extraordinary political and social turmoil, but also on some of the major world events of this period...read more

The author of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara examines a nineteenth-century court case in which an ambitious crusading attorney, Augusto Barbieri, took on the case of Amalia Bagnacavalli, an impoverished, illiterate young peasant woman from the mountains near Bologna, Italy, who contracted syphilis from the sickly baby she had been forced to wet nurse.

Draws on previously unknown documents from the Vatican archives to detail a late-nineteenth-century plot on the part of Pope Pius IX and his successor, Leo XIII, to block the unification of Italy and to seize control of Rome and the Papal States, in a colorful history marked by such key individuals as the two pontiffs, Italy's national hero Garibaldi, King Victor Emmanuel, and France's Napoleon III. Reprint.

Product Description: Book by David I. Kertzer

Product Description: This third and final volume of The History of the European Family series concludes a comprehensive work synthesising what is known about the history of the European family over the past five centuries. It places family history and the changing life experience of ordinary people at the heart of the new social history...read more

Drawing on previously hidden Vatican sources and archival materials, a provovative historical study traces the evolution of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church from the French Revolution to World War II and assesses the Church's role in promoting and disseminating a centuries-long demonization of the Jews throughout Europe that led to the Holocaust. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

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Product Description: This study examines the ways that states have attempted to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into racial, ethnic, and language categories. These attempts, whether through American efforts to divide the U.S. population into mutually exclusive racial categories, or through the Soviet system of inscribing nationality categories on internal passports, have important implications not only for people's own identities and life chances, but for national political and social processes as well...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study examines the ways that states have attempted to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into racial, ethnic, and language categories. These attempts, whether through American efforts to divide the U.S. population into mutually exclusive racial categories, or through the Soviet system of inscribing nationality categories on internal passports, have important implications not only for people's own identities and life chances, but for national political and social processes as well...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsing, Italian Communist Party (PCI) head Achille Occhetto shocked his party in 1989 by insisting that the PCI jettison its old name and become something new. This dramatic book tells of the ensuing struggle within the PCI, which at the time was Italy's second-largest party and the most powerful Communist party in the West. David I. Kertzer's vivid depiction of the conflict brings to life the tactics that party factions employed and the anguish of party members for whom Communism was the core of their identity. Kertzer also tells a larger story from an anthropologist's perspective: the story of the importance of symbols, myths, and rituals in modern politics.

Combining pulsing narrative and careful research, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist tells how a Jewish boy's kidnapping began the decline of the Vatican's political power. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

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Product Description: Sacrificed for Honor reveals a shocking and little-known system for the surveillance and control of unmarried mothers and their children that operated in Catholic Europe for nearly three centuries, ending just a century ago.

How have family relations been regulated through the ages by state institutions and laws? What impact did the advent of Christianity have on marriage? Were parents in the past less emotionally attached to their children? What changes have teken place in legal attitudes and practices toward adultery and "homicides of honor"? How has the position of women in the household altered over the millennia? In this book contributors offer historical and anthropological perspectives on the Western family, focusing on family life in Italy from the Roman EMpire to the present. Using methods that range from symbolic to quantitative analysis, the author discuss a wide variety of topics, including matchmaking, marriage, divorce, inheritance, patterns of household organization, childrearing practices, cultural and legal meanings of death, sexual mores, celibacy (banned in ancient Rome), adoption and property rights. Through its unique combination of chronological sweep and geographical focus, the book aims to shed new light on central questions of continuity, change, and causation in family history.

Product Description: Family, Political Economy, and Demographic Change represents an unprecedented interdisciplinary effort to discover how changes in family life and demographic behavior actually occurred in this crucial period, and how people's lives were affected...read more

Examines the history and purpose of political rituals, discusses examples from Aztec cannibal rites to presidential inauguration, and argues that the use of ritual determines the success of political groups (view table of contents)