Raimondo Luraghi
Raimondo Luraghi (16 August 1921 – 28 December 2012) was an Italian historian, partisan and academic.
Biography
Born in Milan, but a Turin native by choice (his mother, widowed, remarried in the Piedmontese capital when he was a boy), Luraghi was surprised by the armistice in southeastern France, occupied by the Italian Fourth Army. A second lieutenant in the Guardia alla Frontiera, quartered near Saint-Martin-Vésubie, he had already had the opportunity to oppose, with his soldiers, the Germans and Pétain's militia at the Maritime Alps. On September 8, 1943, together with Second Lieutenant Michele Balestrieri and a group of his soldiers, he formed a first partisan unit in the area of San Giacomo di Entracque and on September 16 sustained the first combat.
In January 1944 he joined the Giustizia e Libertà formations, moving in May to the 4th Garibaldi Brigade commanded by Pompeo Colajanni, first as Chief of Staff and then as commander of the Arditi Battalion, with the battle name "Martelli." Wounded in combat on July 29, 1944, he was decorated in the field with a Silver Medal, and then promoted to captain for war merits.
After the war, he was editor of the Piedmont edition of the Unità. After graduating in Turin with Romolo Quazza, with a thesis on Piedmontese antifascism, he was a tenured professor of history and philosophy in high schools (1954) and then lecturer, full professor and finally Emeritus of "American History" and coordinator of the PhD program in "History of the Americas" at the University of Genoa. He also held, albeit as adjunct professor, the chairs of American History and Modern History at the Free International University of Social Studies "Guido Carli" (Luiss) in Rome.
He is considered one of the foremost scholars of the American Civil War, of whose military aspects he has given original interpretations supported by metal detector research on the battlefields. His work on the History of the American Civil War, considered the world's best single-volume work on the subject, has been translated into English and has become a classic even in the United States of America itself.
He was "Visiting Professor" at several North American universities, from Harvard to Richmond (Virginia), Notre Dame (Indiana), New York University, the University of Georgia, and also at the University of Toronto. In 1999 he received the "Roosevelt Prize" for naval history, the first time awarded to a non-U.S. scholar. Together with Chinese Captain Huang Jalin he published the first original Italian translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
He was for ten years (1990–2000) Italy's representative on UNESCO's World Committee on Military History. He was founder (1985), first president and then honorary president of the Italian Society for Military History, as well as honorary president of the Friends of the Italian Military Library Association, president of the Canadian Studies Association, member of the National Geographic Society, the Society of Military History of the United States, and the US Naval Institute. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Science and Culture by the President of the Republic in 1998; he also won the Saint Vincent Prize and the Acqui Award (2008, for La spada e le magnolie).
Raimondo Luraghi died at his home in Turin on December 28, 2012.
His children Silvia and Nino have both become academics: Silvia is Professor of Glottology and Linguistics at the University of Pavia after teaching at the University of Turin and the Roma Tre University; Nino is Wykeham Professor of Ancient (Greek) History at New College, Oxford University.[1]
Works
- Il movimento operaio torinese durante la Resistenza (1958)
- Pensiero e azione economica del conte di Cavour (1961)
- Ascesa e tramonto del colonialismo (1964)
- Storia della guerra civile americana (1966; 2009)
- Gli Stati Uniti (1974)
- La guerra civile americana (1978)
- The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South (1978)
- Opere, by Raimondo Montecuccoli (1988; editor of vol. I e II; vol. III edited by Andrea Testa, 2000)
- "Storia militare." In: Luigi De Rosa, ed., La storiografia italiana degli ultimi vent'anni. IIIː Età contemporanea, Biblioteca di Cultura Moderna (1989), pp. 21–240.
- Marinai del Sud - Storia della Marina confederata nella Guerra civile americana 1861-1865 (1993)
- Resistenza–Album della Guerra di Liberazione (1995)
- Cinque Lezioni sulla guerra civile americana (1997)
- Sul Sentiero della Guerra - Storia delle Guerre Indiane nel Nordamerica (2000)
- Eravamo partigiani - Ricordi del tempo di guerra (2005)
- La spada e le magnolie. Il Sud nella storia degli Stati Uniti (2007)
- La Guerra civile americana. Le ragioni e i protagonisti del primo conflitto industriale (2013)
Notes
- ↑ "Dr Nino Luraghi," Oxford University.
References
- Thomas, Emory M. (2015). "Raimondo Luraghi Remembered," Civil War History, Vol. LXI, No. 1, pp. 64–67.
