This paper focuses on the reading and educational practices of common soldiers during the First World War. It argues that the question of how war libraries were imagined and constructed by civilians needs to be framed in the larger context of pre-war Edwardian debates surrounding the "value of books" in society. Indeed, it was within…

In 1945, Italian society was in crisis. Twenty years of fascism and the aerial bombing and military offensives of the Second World War had left the civilian population suffering and the nation in need of reinvention. In this difficult context, certain anti-fascist intellectuals devised the interesting pedagogical experiment of the 11 Convitti…