Historian's New Book Examines Politics, Society, and Culture in 20th-Century Europe

By Peter Grennen

If you've visited history professor Spencer Di Scala's office recently, chances are he offered for your inspection his copy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter. Think of that document, which was used for the better part of a century before being adapted for the U.S. Constitution, as an emblem of the historiographical methods Di Scala has favored in more than three decades as a scholar and teacher.

It's not enough, Di Scala believes, to simply dismiss a view of history as erroneous; instead, the thesis in question must be reenvisioned and restated. In his recently published textbook Twentieth Century Europe: Politics, Society, Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 816 pp.), Di Scala--director of the graduate program in history and a noted expert on modern Italy--does that and more.

The book, Di Scala's sixth, is a comprehensive analysis of twentieth-century Europe that takes a novel approach to both its subject and to pedagogy in general. Di Scala faults some observers for giving too much attention to the century's most conspicuous events, like world war and the ideological struggle between East and West. "Many historians are carried away by generalizations, trying to make everything fit into a scheme," he says. "I view the period from a post-Cold War perspective--one that focuses on long-term trends that revolve around cultural developments."

Early-century advances in science have a special prominence in Di Scala's reassessment. "Revolutionary ideas in the world of physics--like quantum mechanics and relativity theory--brought a breakdown in the 'certain view of the world' offered by Newton," says Di Scala. This fundamentally changed many thinkers' world-view, presenting for the first time a seemingly irrational natural order.

It makes sense, therefore, to explore unconventional sources when writing twentieth-century history--what Di Scala calls the "hidden, unseen, and mystical aspects of life." To be sure, Di Scala has his own strategies: "I attempt to bring the real lives of people into the picture--the life of the person as a whole--and I look at the contributions of small countries."

Di Scala takes a keen interest in the European Union's recent efforts to draft a constitution. In October, he organized and moderated a conference called "Constitution-Making in the Eighteenth and the Twenty-first Centuries," which explored parallels between the concerns of the European Union and those of the American founding fathers. Held at the Massachusetts Archives/Commonwealth Museum, the event featured an address by Giuliano Amato, vice president of the EU's constitutional convention.

The EU and its constitution-in-the-making also figure prominently in Twentieth Century Europe. "The book explores the struggle for a united Europe through war and consensus," Di Scala says. Here, especially, he takes pains to give minor players in the European community their proper historical emphasis. "Smaller states like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg provided a model for the European economic cooperation that knit the continent together," he explains.

Of course, that cooperation has been a long time coming, hampered by the spread of communism and attempts to achieve European unification through force. But as long as Europe's people and leaders felt it was worth seeking, says Di Scala, it was bound to come about as soon as circumstances permitted. "Tendencies that seem minor and that are overwhelmed by more spectacular events can later come to the fore," he points out.

Perhaps that's the most important lesson Di Scala's approach to history teaches: As with the principles of governance set down in the colony charter he displays in his office, sometimes it takes a long while before world affairs allow a concept to find its full expression.

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