1. 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.
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.
Editorial Governance Structure
The Nuova Rivista Storica (NRS) maintains a dual committee system comprising a 35-member Editorial Board and Scientific Committee, exclusively composed of scholars from Italian and international universities or affiliated with leading cultural institutions. Governance follows a tripartite structure:
Editor-in-Chief (“non despotic but Cirenean” in Federico Chabod’s formulation), responsible for strategic coordination and intellectual direction
Deputy Editor with legal oversight obligations
Steering Committee of 11 specialists covering core historical disciplines:
11/A1: Medieval History
11/A2: Early Modern History
11/A3: Contemporary History | Eastern European History
11/A4: Book/Document Studies | History of Religions
14/B2: International Relations | Non-European Societies & Institutions
This disciplinary configuration has earned NRS “Category A” certification from Italy’s National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research System (ANVUR), designating it as a premier venue in historical studies.
Operational Framework
The committees are supported by a 10-member Editorial Office executing:
Manuscript formatting to Chicago Manual of Style standards
Author correspondence and peer-review coordination
Digital platform management (ISSN 0029-6236, DOI integration)
Indexing compliance with major databases (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIH PLUS)
(https://www.nuovarivistastorica.it/indicizzazione-e-valutazione/).
The relationship among the three sections that make up the journal’s organizational structure is not hierarchical but horizontal. Every member of the Editorial Board has the authority to propose topics, take initiative, and see projects through to completion. For example, of the five thematic issues published by NRS between 2009 and 2017, three—“War and Conflict,” “Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages,” and “Italy and the First Global Conflict, 1914–1918”—were conceived and organized by the Steering Committee. The other two issues—“The Labyrinths of the Coup d’État” and “ENI and the End of the Golden Age”—originated from the initiative and work of members of the Scientific Committee.
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.
It should also be noted that articles published in Nuova Rivista Storica are catalogued and abstracted in the following indexes: Thomson Reuters Web of Science (Arts & Humanities Citation Index, formerly ISI); Scopus; Scimago Journal & Country Rank; ESF-ERIH (European Science Foundation Review of Journals); AIDA (Articoli Italiani di Periodici Accademici); EBSCO Information Services; JournalSeek; ESSPER; BSN – Bibliografia Storica Nazionale; the Italian Periodicals Catalogue (ACNP); and Google Scholar.
3.From the journal’s founding in 1945 until the late 1990s, as summarized on its website (https://www.nuovarivistastorica.it/info/), it remained broadly faithful to its founding principles. After that date, NRS experienced a gradual—initially almost imperceptible—period of decline. Medieval History received disproportionately large space compared to other fields, and too often NRS’s treatment of the Middle Ages was confined to an Italocentric perspective, focusing predominantly on northern regions of the country and on events and themes of limited general significance.
Since 2008, and in the years that followed, thanks to the “revolutionary” overhaul of the Editorial Board already mentioned, the journal and its book series—Biblioteca della Nuova Rivista Storica, now at its 62nd title (https://www.nuovarivistastorica.it/biblioteca/), and Minima Storiografica, comprising nine titles (https://www.nuovarivistastorica.it/minima-storiografica/)—have once again become instruments of “general history” in the fullest sense and, concurrently, of “global history.” They now address widely international issues and feature substantial contributions from foreign scholars, including articles in French, English, Spanish, and German.
The study of the Middle Ages has returned to a longue durée, European and Mediterranean framework, explored through broad historiographical perspectives spanning the full geographical and chronological scope of that era. It is now understood not only as an Italian phenomenon—where the journal identified the components of a genuine “national market after the thirteenth century,” oriented westward and northward—but also as projecting from Italy towards North Africa, the Levant, the Black Sea, and the Balkans. In this view, the Middle Ages become an age marked by both conflict and convergence among different religions, ethnicities, and cultures; an economic space at once diverse and unified by expansive trade networks and pervasive interactions.
Likewise, for Early Modern History the emphasis has shifted to the international historiographical debate on the great themes of the history of the world: the structure and evolution of the Spanish Empire across its European, American, and Asian subsystems; the globalizing impact of Jesuit evangelization on economic and cultural life; the diplomatic maneuverings aimed at constructing a common European international law; and the emergence of the distinct old Italian states—especially the Viceroyalty and the Kingdom of Naples (later the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies)—with their Mediterranean projection and interactions with other political entities both within and beyond Europe.
Contemporary History, Eastern European History, and the history of International Relations have undergone a similar process of reorientation—though in part a “return to origins.” Major historiographical questions have once again been addressed, from the first to the late contemporary age, extending to the “history in the making,” which can be outlined as follows:
The construction of a new European order—from the Crimean War and the Austro-Franco-Prussian conflicts to its collapse in the Balkan Wars—including the Italian unification process in an international perspective, analyzed beyond the confines of old Risorgimento orthodoxy.
The First World War, the interwar period, and the Second World War, examined in their political, diplomatic, military, strategic, and economic dimensions both within and beyond Europe, in an authentically global frame.
Italian colonialism in foreign policy from the late nineteenth century through the post-World War II period, studied in its particularities and in comparison with other colonial systems.
The history of Italian diplomacy from 1861 to the First Republic.
The analysis of “cultural diplomacy” as conducted by the great powers during the Cold War through mass media channels (print, cinema, radio, television).
The history of the First and Second Italian Republics based on documentary evidence rather than misleading ideological paradigms.
Political issues related to energy procurement in the 1970s and 1980s.
The history of fashion and interior design as indicators of social transformation, shifts in mentality, changes in daily life, and evolutions in family and gender relations induced by industrialization and the changing world of work in the twentieth century.
The current crisis of the global geopolitical order—shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the impact of globalization, the outbreak of the “Arab Springs,” the rise of new neo-imperial powers (the Russian Federation, India, Iran), and emerging conflict zones on the eastern borders of the European Union and NATO, in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indo-Pacific.
Finally, crucial to NRS’s thematic renewal has been the contribution of foreign scholars—from France, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United States, and Germany—and, above all, the very numerous historians from Central and Eastern Europe (the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, the Russian Federation, Turkey), from South American republics (notably Argentina), and from Central Asia (Kazakhstan). The journal’s editorial leadership now plans to extend this international cohort shortly to include historians from the Middle East and Japan, with whom contacts have already been established.
4.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.
5.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.
REFERENCE
A. CASALI, Storici italiani fra le due guerre. La “Nuova Rivista Storica”, 1917-1943, Napoli, Guida, 1980
M. DOGLIO, La “Nuova Rivista Storica” e la storiografia del Novecento (1917-1945), in «Nuova Rivista Storica», 54, 1980.
M. BERENGO, Gino Luzzatto, Corrado Barbagallo, “Nuova Rivista Storica” e la censura fascista, in Studi in onore di Paolo Alatri. II. L’Italia contemporanea, Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane 1991
G. SEDITA, La spia degli storici. Aldo Romano e la “Nuova Rivista Storica”, in «Nuova Rivista Storica», 93, 2009, 3
B. FIGLIUOLO, Come nacque la “Nuova Rivista Storica” 1915-1916, in «Nuova Rivista Storica», 104, 2020, 3
E. DI RIENZO, Grande Guerra, dopoguerra e fascismo. La “Nuova Rivista Storica”: dagli esordi alla crisi d’isolamento, 1917-1945, in «Nuova Rivista Storica», 104, 2020, 3
.
