Victoria De Grazia

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

America's Advance Through Twentieth-century Europe

Irresistible Empire

Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini's commander of the Black Shirts, exemplified fascism's obsession with male strength. Through the story of his broken marriage to a young Jewish American opera star, Victoria de Grazia explores the cult of masculinity on which the New Rome was to be built, revealing the seductive appeal of fascism.

A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini's Italy

The Perfect Fascist

The efforts of fascism to form a 'culture of consent,' or shape depoliticized activities, in Italy between the world wars, make a unique portrait of fascist political tactics. Professor de Grazia focuses on the dopolavoro or fascist leisure-time organization, the largest of the regime's mass institutions. She traces its gradual rise in importance for the consolidation of fascist rule; its spread in the form of thousands of local clubs into every domain of urban and rural life; and its overwhelming impact on the distribution, consumption, and character of all kinds of recreational pursuits - from sports and adult education to movies, traveling theaters, radio, and tourism. The author shows how fascism was able, between 1926 and 1939, to build a new definition of the public sphere. Recasting the public sphere entailed dispensing with traditional class and politically defined modes of organizing those social roles and desires existing outside the workplace.

Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy

The Culture of Consent

The most significant conquest of the 20th century may have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe’s bourgeois civilization. It is this campaign that unfolds in de Grazia’s account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony.

America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in de Grazia's account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, de Grazia describes how all alternative strategies fell before America's consumer-oriented capitalism--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning.--From publisher description.

America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

A portrait of the dopolavoro, or leisure-time organization, the largest of the regime's mass institutions.

University of California Press

Victoria DeGrazia

Ellen Furlough

"A rare pleasure. Rooting gender and consumption in the actions of people making their own history, these brilliant essays move from nineteenth-century pinups to the formation of gendered modernity. Once you've savored this volume, you'll never think of modern life in the same way again."--Temma Kaplan, author of Red City, Blue Period

Victoria De Grazia

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