Congratulations to this year's History Department graduates! 🎉🥳

Collected on this day in 2019, this Youth Front poster, which features the silhouette of a Roman centurion, proclaims "Europe Is Renewed by the Youth." URL: www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/32

This poster, which features the slogan "Today Just as Yesterday, (East) Rome Is Anti-Fascist," appeared in the alleyways of Rome's Prenestino-Centocelle neighborhood to promote a celebratory public march to Piazza delle Camelie on April 25th, 2019. URL: www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/26

While this CasaPound Italy poster was intended to promote a discussion on the "magical archeology” of Giacomo Boni at the group's headquarters, its appearance on April 25th, 2019 was intended to visually disrupt Rome's "Liberation Day" celebrations. URL: www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/25

Buona festa della liberazione amici!!! #25aprile To learn more about the significance of April 25th in Italy, see the following entries in Where Monsters Are Born: www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/22 www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/26 www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/27

Robert O. Paxton's 9 qualities of fascist movements (summarized by Dan Tamir):

Dr. @amycking.bsky.social and I wrote a teaching module on "Authoritarian Aesthetics and Youth Appeals" in Fascist Italy for the American Historical Review's "Authoritarianism 101" project. See below! And please share widely.

Collected on this day in 2019, this poster highlights the way in which Georgia Meloni’s far-right political party, the Brothers of Italy, transformed its public image from a “post-fascist” to a “center-right” party via political branding. URL: www.wheremonstersareborn.com/items/show/20

Check out my latest Book Talk with Dr. Masha Fedorova-Warden! 👇

March 23, 2026 marks the 106th anniversary of Benito Mussolini's founding of the Italian Fighting Squads movement. This poster, which I collected in Rome's EUR district, was put up around Italy by CasaPound Italy's youth group, Student Bloc, to celebrate the centennial of Fascism's founding.

One of my former UCLA mentees, Isabella Terrizzano, published this fantastic OpEd in Georgetown University's History Department student journal, The Footnote!

Is the Trump administration using ChatGPT for our foreign policy? 🙃🫠

BOOK REVIEW: Rita Maricocchi and Brian Quinn on Jürgen Zimmerer, Germany’s History Wars: Contesting Memory and Identity Today (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025).

Comrade Farmer: "An example of the former—the eccentric—was the ingenuous farmer who named his pig after the duce in order to have the pleasure of going into the field every morning and shouting (with impunity, he thought) ‘Mussolini Pig’ at the top of his voice (he got five years of confino)."

If you're interested in learning about the history of American-Soviet agricultural exchange during the interwar decades, join Dr. Fedorova and I on March 24th from 11am to 12:30pm via Zoom. RSVP here: fresnostate.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

New book chapter on its way! This one's on the (quasi-abandoned) field of Generic Fascism. I hope to make somewhat of a splash with a Digital History integration. More soon!

I recently hosted Dr. Simone Cinotto at the @fresnostatelibrary.bsky.social for a book talk on his latest research monograph, Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935-1941 (Bloomsbury, 2024). The following is a video recording of Dr. Cinotto's presentation.

In May 1924, Giacomo Matteotti -- the influential socialist MP under Benito Mussolini's pre-dictatorship government -- accused the Blackshirts of intimidating voters at the polls. In some cases, Matteotti contended, the Duce's fascists flashed daggers or pistols, ...

Welcome to Hell.

To my Fresno State colleagues and friends, please consider attending!

See the open letter co-signed by over 300 scholars on the state-sponsored attacks against historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. We stand against intimidation and for academic freedom. #AcademicFreedom #History #Holocaust #Poland

Congratulations to Dr. Maritere Lopez on the launch of her podcast, "The Early Modern Monster Manual." ABOUT THE PODCAST: What made a monster in the early modern world? In The Early Modern Monster Manual, students at Fresno State explore how monsters were imagined ...

The panopticon perfected.

On Jan 7, 1978, five members of the MSI’s youth group were ambushed by militants in Rome’s Tuscolano neighborhood. Franco Bigonzetti was killed at the scene; Francesco Ciavatta died shortly after. This event, at the Via Acca Larenzia social center, remains a flashpoint in Italian history. 🧵

Where Monsters Are Born was reviewed in this month's issue of The Public Historian! See below.

Scientists: We must stop using fossil fuels and develop an alternative, renewable energy paradigm so that we can save human civilization from a rapidly approaching full-scale collapse due to an industrially-driven destabilization of Earth's climatic systems. Industrialists: Let's blot out the sun.

I don't know how many of you out there are history buffs, but I can think of at least two reasons why Germany building up "Europe's strongest army" is a bad idea...

Headlines: Hitler had a micropenis. *iPhone > Power > Off*