The Nuova Rivista Storica (NRS) marked its centenary with the publication of its January-March 2017 issue. Alongside Archivio Storico Italiano (1842) and Rivista Storica Italiana (1884), it stands as one of Italy’s oldest scholarly periodicals dedicated to general historical studies with both national and international scope. As a journal that has actively shaped historical scholarship, accompanied Italians through their historical trajectory, and itself become a subject of historiographical inquiry – as evidenced by the extensive critical literature catalogued in the bibliographical note concluding this volume – the NRS represents a pivotal institution in Italian cultural life. Its founding constituted a watershed moment for historical studies in Italy. While this intellectual transformation began taking shape during the first decade of the twentieth century, the outbreak of the Great War significantly accelerated its development, enabling a clearer articulation of the journal’s scholarly objectives and methodological strategies.
1. The profound geopolitical, political, and social transformations wrought by the First World War fundamentally shaped the editorial agenda articulated by the NRS leadership (Corrado Barbagallo, Guido Porzio, Ettore Rota), which boldly proclaimed its distinction from “the conventional approaches of other historical journals” (Our Program, no. 1, January-March 1917). The program aspired to “exert specialized influence within our historiographical culture,” conceived by its architects as “most responsive to the exigencies of the present epoch.” More concretely, NRS sought to emphasize “greater attention to lived experience and political dimensions,” engaging with stimuli from “contemporary history – even unfolding history – from which historical analysis should derive its most vital sustenance.”
Concurrently, the journal positioned itself in explicit opposition to the antiquarian and hyper-specialized orientation epitomized by competitors like the Rivista Storica Italiana under Costanzo Rinaudo’s editorship. The editorial critique targeted the “critical-historical method inherited from German scholarship which, while advancing source methodology, had reduced history to auxiliary disciplines – philology, paleography, diplomatics, archaeology – at the expense of synthetic historical understanding.” This stance resonated with Benedetto Croce’s urgent 1915 appeal to “cultivate the historical consciousness lacking among Italians, particularly regarding political, social, and intellectual life,” advocating fundamental reform of post-unification historiographical paradigms. The war’s catalytic effect demanded awakening Italian scholarship from its erudite stagnation and aligning it with “not merely contemporary but increasingly urgent imperatives.”
The Nuova Rivista Storica (NRS) explicitly disavowed any intention to “chase contemporaneity,” though its inaugural issue revealingly juxtaposed studies on classical Greece, the Protestant Reformation, and eighteenth-century Franco-Italian cultural relations with Ettore Rota’s seminal essay The European War and the Problem of Its Causes. This work established an analytical framework for monitoring the military, diplomatic, and political dynamics of the ongoing conflict and their long-term repercussions – a research program that remained operative through 1920. The journal’s core mission lay rather in systematically developing Benedetto Croce’s 1912 paradigm of “contemporary history” (storia presente). This theoretical approach distinguished “authentic history” from mere “philological history” – the latter being “unreflective recollection preserved in abstract verbiage” – insisting that legitimate historical inquiry must emerge from present experience, since “only contemporary existential concerns can motivate investigation of past events, which gain significance precisely through their resonance with current vital interests.”
The “contemporary history” framework served NRS as both methodological foundation and interdisciplinary bridge, enabling the journal to cultivate symbiotic relationships with adjacent humanities disciplines (economics, law, political geography, religious studies, literature, philosophy) while developing its distinctive model of “general history.” This integrative paradigm, which would mature during the interwar period, maintained political history’s primacy while systematically incorporating economic, social, institutional, and cultural dimensions alongside international relations. The model consciously aimed to expand history’s readership beyond academic specialists to embrace the educated middle class, thereby transforming historical analysis into a vehicle for ongoing civic education and positioning historians as “national mentors” – a role carefully distinguished from that of “princely advisors.”
This intellectual agenda received explicit reaffirmation in NRS’s 1918 inaugural editorial manifesto, which rejected “tedious critical exercises on fragmented minutiae” and “superficial document exegesis” in favor of “comprehensive interpretation of social phenomena, particularly political developments in their broadest conceptual dimensions.” The program fulfilled the vision articulated by preeminent Italian historians Gaetano Salvemini and Gioacchino Volpe, who as early as January 1906 had advocated for “a widely circulated journal serving as dynamic historical medium accessible to non-specialists, suitable for inclusion in educated households and secondary school libraries.” Their proposal mandated prioritizing “substantive investigations of enduring historical structures over ephemeral antiquarian pursuits,” insisting scholars must “eschew erudition as an end in itself to engage instead with vital, broadly significant questions.”
The Nuova Rivista Storica (NRS) maintained unwavering fidelity to this intellectual program throughout its century-long trajectory, navigating the cataclysmic events of two world wars, the fascist dictatorship era – when the journal endured orchestrated press campaigns, infiltration by Ovra (the fascist secret police), the forced removal of co-director Gino Luzzatto under racial laws, and narrowly avoided dissolution in October 1938 through proposed merger with the Rivista Storica Italiana under Gioacchino Volpe, a bureaucratic absorption first contemplated in 1935 by Education Minister Cesare De Vecchi di Val Cismon. This commitment persisted through Italy’s postwar material and moral reconstruction, the constitutional transformations of the First and Second Republics with their alternating zeniths and crises, and into our current globalized epoch with its distinctive challenges and opportunities.
As a resolutely non-partisan publication transcending ideological or methodological dogmas, NRS continues to mediate between historical analysis and contemporary relevance while expanding its scope beyond Italian history to encompass European and global perspectives. Though anchored in the interwar “general history” paradigm prioritizing political narratives attuned to economic, social, institutional, and international dimensions, the journal actively incorporates emerging historiographical frontiers: material culture studies, history of mentalities, medical history (including pandemic studies), military history, demographic history, political thought, and more recently, groundbreaking contributions in Gender and LGBT History. This interdisciplinary engagement extends to geopolitical analysis, though the editorial board vigilantly guards against disciplinary overreach that might reduce history to transient sociological or political science frameworks, or worse, fragment historical knowledge into nebulous subcategories – a safeguarding measure ensuring preservation of its core mission: reconstructing history’s grand structural patterns through synthetic interpretation.
Crucially, NRS’s methodological pluralism remains subordinate to its foundational epistemological principle – articulated in its 1918 manifesto – that historical scholarship must transcend “tedious critical exercises on fragmented minutiae” to achieve “comprehensive interpretation of social phenomena.” This orientation fulfills the unrealized 1906 vision of Gaetano Salvemini and Gioacchino Volpe for historical inquiry that engages educated non-specialists through examination of enduring civilizational structures rather than ephemeral antiquarian details. The journal’s survival through totalitarian suppression and neoliberal globalization ultimately validates its founders’ conviction that rigorous, synthetic historical analysis constitutes indispensable nourishment for democratic civic culture.
2. As a matter of principle, NRS defines itself as a “non-aligned” journal, and the members of the Editorial Committee as well as the active authors represent diverse and sometimes opposing educational backgrounds, scholarly traditions, and ideological and political affiliations. This diversity has fueled vigorous debates—on topics such as the vexed but unresolved issue of the seventeenth-century revolutions/uprisings; the fraught historical relationship between the Mezzogiorno and Italian unification; the analysis of Fascist foreign policy in its global projection; and the transition process in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR—that have always been aired openly on our pages. This contestatory spirit does not trouble us. Indeed, we believe that loyalty to the project of an “internationally minded general history,” as pursued by the journal, suffices to maintain the cohesion of our working group. We would rather be accused of eclecticism than abandon NRS’s mission, as formulated in the 1950s: “The Journal, true to its aim of promoting research and the free exchange of ideas, is open to every expression and discussion of results or trends in the field of history and its methodology.”
Over the last decade, our commitment to guaranteeing full academic freedom—even against potential pressures from within the Editorial Committee—has been strengthened by adopting an Ethical Code based on COPE guidelines and by practicing double-blind peer review. Except for the Forum, Interpretations, and Survey sections—which are each evaluated by a single referee—and for book reviews, all submissions undergo an initial screening by the Steering and Scientific Committees and then a double-blind review process.
While this evaluation system is by no means perfect, as the extensive scholarly literature on peer review attests, it remains of great value both to the journal and to authors. Thorough refereeing should not be a mere inquisitorial exercise resulting in a verdict of acceptance or rejection; rather, it should become, through the mediation of the editorial staff, a dialogue between reviewer and author. Thanks to the reviewer’s comments and suggestions, a high-quality contribution—even if imperfect or lacking in certain documentary or bibliographical aspects—can be improved in its final form. We do not hesitate, in this regard, to speak of the “pedagogical value” of blind peer review.
Regarding the journal’s wider international reach—already reflected by its presence in the major libraries of Europe and the Anglophone world—it should be noted that, since 2015, the review texts published in Nuova Rivista Storica have been indexed and made freely available via the Recensio.net portal, maintained by the Bavarian State Library in collaboration with the Universities of Cologne and Mainz. By prior agreement with these institutions, the Editorial Board also intends to provide open access to the Forum, Interpretations, and Surveys sections.
3. Today, making history means, above all, engaging with a body of sources far broader than that available to historians just twenty or thirty years ago. In addition to epigraphic, paper-based, and iconographic documents, we now draw upon literary and audiovisual materials—film, television, even comic strips and animated cartoons—as well as the vast repository of data accessible on the web. This expansion offers an important opportunity that Nuova Rivista Storica must certainly embrace, yet with caution: we must first establish a “hierarchy of sources” that prevents the flood of new information from undermining rigorous research practices.
The same caveat applies to certain general methodological frameworks that, while theoretically compelling, carry their own risks and practical challenges. The hasty and fashionable alignment of historiographical work with World History paradigms—often in uncritical resonance with a crude philosophy of globalization and an attempt to shed Eurocentric bias—can yield a drawback remarkably akin to that of microhistory. By insisting on a universal contextualization of human societies across time and space, this approach tends to produce a flattened, undifferentiated narrative of historical development, in which divergent origins, outcomes, and the rise of political or cultural peaks are levelled into a broad parallelism of world events.
Furthermore, World History’s tendency to minimize or even eliminate the significance of political borders and macro‐institutions (states and empires), favoring a transregional perspective marked by migrations, diasporas, and supranational cultural, economic, and social networks, certainly helps overcome the narrow confines of state‐centered historiography. Yet it overlooks the lessons of geopolitics, which regard ethnic, confessional, imperial, and national frontiers as central to historical dynamics. Finally, World History risks offering inadequate or misleading explanations of our own era’s developments—characterized by the vigorous resurgence of ethno-religious boundaries and political-military borders from Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean to South Asia, and by the disappearance as well as the re‐emergence of new state-empires in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Indo-Pacific.
4. The warning—heard from many quarters—about a “crisis in historical scholarship,” even of the “uselessness of the historian’s craft,” is not underestimated by NRS’s Editorial Committee. Indeed, we are witnessing an unstoppable process of “historical illiteracy,” both spontaneous and induced, affecting all advanced democracies. Its primary cause is the deterioration of primary and higher education; next, the disappearance of twentieth-century ideological passion; and finally, the difficulty of engaging with our historiographical model users from non-European cultural backgrounds—a group already significant in number and destined to grow rapidly.
The core readership of traditional historical publications—the moderately educated general public—has dwindled almost to extinction. In Italy, as elsewhere, the non-specialist history reader today is drawn exclusively to the sensationalist, scandal-driven, quasi-scientific interpretation of the past: the Middle Ages recast as fantasy; the great economic and political transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented through conspiratorial narratives; the private, titillating aspects of historical figures’ lives investigated to the exclusion of their public roles.
Although we have always supported cooperation between professional historians and the media, NRS must acknowledge that the journalistic and television industries have fallen short of the role they might have played in this field. In our country especially, the figure of the journalistic or television “mediator”—one who bridges rigorous scholarly literature and non-specialist readers—remains absent, whereas it survives in the Anglophone world. Historians themselves bear serious responsibility for having ghettoized our output into hyper-specialized, microhistorical, even frankly provincial or municipal compartments, or for having projected it—without sufficient resources—into ambitious, but unrealistic, global panoramas, thereby abdicating the analysis of major historiographical questions and the study of personalities, events, historical cycles, and epochal ruptures that, after profoundly shaping the past, continue to mark our present. That challenge—yesterday as today—remains NRS’s foremost priority and daily endeavor.
