Although Juan Peron changed the course of modern Argentine history, scholars have often interpreted him in terms of their own ideologies and interests, rather than seeing the effect of this man and his movement had on the Argentine people. The essays in this volume seek to uncover the man behind the myth, to define the true nature of Peronism. Several chapters view Perón's rise to power, his deposition and eighteen-year exile, and his dramatic return in 1973. Others examine: opposing forces in modern Argentina, including the church and its role in politics; the conflict between landed stancieros and urban industrialists, terrorist activities and their populist support base; Peronism and the labor movement; and Evita Perón's role in advancing the political rights of women.

The rise of Juan Perón to power in Argentina in the 1940s is one of the most studied subjects in Argentine history. But no book before this has examined the role the Peronists’ struggle with the major commercial newspaper media played in the movement’s evolution, or what the resulting transformation of this industry meant for the normative and practical redefinition of the relationships among state, press, and public. In The Fourth Enemy, James Cane traces the violent confrontations, backroom deals, and legal actions that allowed Juan Domingo Perón to convert Latin America’s most vibrant commercial newspaper industry into the region’s largest state-dominated media empire. An interdisciplinary study drawing from labor history, communication studies, and the history of ideas, this book shows how decades-old conflicts within the newspaper industry helped shape not just the social crises from which Peronism emerged, but the very nature of the Peronist experiment as well.

The author succeeds admirably in defining and describing the complex phenomenon known as Peronism, as well as the distinctive ethos from which it sprang. He also provides a concise history of Argentina, a biography of Juan Peron (and his comparably mythic wife Evita) and in a postscript reviews events in Argentina since Peron's death in 1974....Crassweller brings Peron into clear focus.

While fascism perhaps reached its peak in the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, it continues to permeate governments today. This reference work explores the history of fascism and how it has shaped daily life up to the present day. Perhaps the most notable example of Fascism was Hitler's Nazi Germany. Fascists aimed to control the media and other social institutions, and Fascist views and agendas informed a wide range of daily life and popular culture. But while Fascism flourished around the world in the decades before and after World War II, it continues to shape politics and government today. This reference explores the history of Fascism around the world and across time, with special attention to how Fascism has been more than a political philosophy but has instead played a significant role in the lives of everyday people. Volume one begins with a introduction that surveys the history of Fascism around the world and follows with a timeline citing key events related to Fascism. Roughly 180 alphabetically arranged reference entries follow. These entries discuss such topics as conditions for working people, conditions for women, Fascist institutions that regulated daily life, attitudes toward race, physical culture, the arts, and more. Primary source documents give readers first-hand accounts of Fascist thought and practice. A selected bibliography directs users to additional resources.

In the early part of this century, Argentina was one of the most affluent nations in the world. Since then, the Argentine economy has experienced long periods of stagnation and recession. Larry Sawers links the country's economic failure to the backwardness of the interior, which comprises 70 percent of the area of the country and in which nearly one-third of the population resides.The interior's poverty, according to Sawers, is caused by the scarcity of agricultural resources and by serious inequalities in the distribution of those resources. The region is poorly endowed, land has been degraded through abuse and overuse, and most farmers work tiny, unproductive plots. Moreover, most of the products of the interior are produced for highly protected domestic markets and face stiff competition and falling prices in world markets. Recent reforms in Argentina have dramatically aggravated the economic crisis of the interior.Sawers shows how the poverty of the interior has contributed to the dismal performance of the Argentine economy as a whole. He emphasizes the deleterious effects of extensive emigration from the interior to the major urban areas that are unable to absorb the human tide. Additionally, the national government has taxed the more prosperous regions in order to subsidize the interior, placing a severe drain on the federal government budget and worsening inflation. The effects of the interior's poverty on the nation are also political. Sawers argues that the backward political system in the interior exacerbates the worst features of the national political culture and governance, which in turn pose profound obstacles to economic progress.

In The Argentine Silent Majority, Sebastián Carassai focuses on middle-class culture and politics in Argentina from the end of the 1960s. By considering the memories and ideologies of middle-class Argentines who did not get involved in political struggles, he expands thinking about the era to the larger society that activists and direct victims of state terror were part of and claimed to represent. Carassai conducted interviews with 200 people, mostly middle-class non-activists, but also journalists, politicians, scholars, and artists who were politically active during the 1970s. To account for local differences, he interviewed people from three sites: Buenos Aires; Tucumán, a provincial capital rocked by political turbulence; and Correa, a small town which did not experience great upheaval. He showed the middle-class non-activists a documentary featuring images and audio of popular culture and events from the 1970s. In the end Carassai concludes that, during the years of la violencia, members of the middle-class silent majority at times found themselves in agreement with radical sectors as they too opposed military authoritarianism but they never embraced a revolutionary program such as that put forward by the guerrilla groups or the most militant sectors of the labor movement.