Fascist Football: Imagining ‘Nation’ through Calcio

by Joseph Colubriale

Studies of Italian Fascism have spent a lot of time assessing the roles that rituals, myths and symbols of the regime played in “regenerating” a mystical, national collective; however, few have considered the cultural role that football played in the imagining of Italy’s national community under Fascism.

The Attraction of the Futile

I suppose that I’ve always been prone to pessimistic over-analysis, that’s just who I am, but the handful of weeks that have passed since I finished my educational career have given me far more time to occupy myself with the indulgences of introspection. Naked to the urgent winds of post-university reality, I have taken it upon myself to take a step back and look more fully at the tasks over which I regularly obsess. Needless to say, as I spend a great deal of my time writing (or at least attempting to do so), my activities as a blogger have not escaped close scrutiny.

England: The Dismal Science

There is a particularly notable passage in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science (a play on Thomas Carlyle’s The Dismal Science) which encapsulates much of his thinking in an arrestingly allegorical fashion. In it a madman rises in the early hours of the morning, lights a lantern and runs screaming into the local marketplace with great agitation.

1950s Month: Post-War Football and the Creation of the Teenager

Jayne Mansfield on a visit to White Hart Lane

by Jim Milnes

There’s one at every club. Intricate hair, intricate tattoos, ‘obvious’ girlfriends. Strops, tabloid scandals and growing pains. Football has always been a good home to teenagers; a mode of communication for the shy, and a goldmine to those so inclined.

Hakoah Vienna: The triumph and the tragedy

Few football clubs can lay claim to a history as successful and yet ultimately tragic as that of Hakoah Vienna. An exclusively Jewish team which enjoyed global fame for a short time before being unsentimentally dissolved by Nazi invaders, Hakoah’s history now stands as a monument to the Jewish culture which blossomed in Central Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century, only to be abominably stamped out by the forces of the Third Reich.