by Rebecca Hill

About Rebecca Hill

Rebecca Hill is Professor of American Studies at Kennesaw State University. She is the author of Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History and editor, with Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello and Joseph Entin, of Teaching American Studies: State of the Classroom as State of the Field.

Fascism

book Keywords for American Cultural Studies

The Italian fascio is best translated as “band” or “league,” a term shared by a variety of Italian activist groups in the early twentieth century. Benito Mussolini bound the “Fasci” indelibly to the modern understanding of “fascism” when he and about a hundred radical nationalists and syndicalists formed the “Fasci Italiani de Combattimento” in 1919 to “declare war against socialism” (Paxton 2004; Payne1995). Starting with an attack on the office of the Socialist party newspaper, the fascists grew in power as, backed by landowners, they attacked socialists across Italy, killing as many as 900 people between 1920 and 1922. After this violent campaign, Italy’s king invited Mussolini to lead the government, ultimately disbanding parliament and criminalizing opposition parties.