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International audience; Target properties such as thickness and composition are essential ingredients in nuclear physics experiments, therefore, dedicated analyses to evaluate them before and/or after the measurement are often performed. In some experimental techniques, the exploited detectors allow for the evaluation of these properties on-line, i.e. directly during the experiment. In this paper, we report on the use of analysis methods coming from the Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy technique to obtain on-line information on the target used in a nuclear physics experiment. This measurement was performed at INFN LNL by exploiting the low-energy Coulomb excitation technique. The results have been compared with an independent Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy analysis of the same target performed at INFN LABEC in Florence.

The electromagnetic structure of Zn66 at low excitation energy was investigated via low-energy Coulomb excitation at INFN Legnaro National Laboratories, using the Gamma Array of Legnaro Infn Laboratories for nuclEar spectrOscopy (GALILEO) γ-ray spectrometer coupled to the SPIDER (Silicon PIe DEtectoR). A set of reduced E2, E3, and M1 matrix elements was extracted from the collected data using the gosia code, yielding 12 reduced transition probabilities between the low-spin states and the spectroscopic quadrupole moment of the 21+ state. The B(E2) values for transitions depopulating the 02+ state have been determined for the first time, allowing for the lifetime of this state to be deduced and, consequently, the ρ2(E0;02+→01+) monopole transition strength to be extracted. In addition, the B(E3;31−→01+) value has been determined for the first time in a Coulomb excitation experiment. The obtained results resolve the existing discrepancies between literature lifetimes and demonstrate that Zn66 cannot be described by using simple collective models. Therefore, new state-of-the-art beyond-mean-field and large-scale shell-model calculations were performed in order to interpret the structure of this nucleus. Both the experimental and theoretical results suggest that the triaxial degree of freedom has an important impact on electromagnetic properties of Zn66, while the unique features of the 02+ state indicate its distinct and rather isolated structure.

International audience; SPIDER is a new array of segmented silicon detectors for low-energy Coulomb-excitation experiments, designed as an ancillary device for modern γ -ray spectrometers such as GALILEO and AGATA. Currently, it is used at the INFN Legnaro National Laboratories (LNL) for experiments with the GALILEO γ -ray array and the stable beams provided by the Tandem-XTU, ALPI-PIAVE accelerator complex. In this paper, a detailed description of SPIDER is presented, as well as the outcomes from the first in-beam experiment of the array coupled with GALILEO. In particular, radiation damage and cross-talk/charge-sharing effects induced by energetic heavy ions in SPIDER are investigated and the capabilities of the array to perform on-line Rutherford back-scattering analysis of the exploited target are presented. The material reported here can be used to plan future experiments with the GALILEO-SPIDER setup with the presently available stable beams at LNL and paves the way for future experimental campaigns with the radioactive beams provided in the near future by the SPES facility at LNL.

Low-energy Coulomb excitation is one of the simplest and most known tools to study the nuclear shape; for this reason it is nowadays widely used at radioactive beam facilities. The SPES facility, for the acceleration of radioactive beams will soon provide the first exotic beams at the Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro (LNL) in Italy.a#13; To this end a new particle detector (Silicon PIe DEtectoR) to be used for Coulomb excitation studies has been installed at LNL. SPIDER has been coupled to the GALILEO array of germanium detectors, and a number of experiments have been already successfully performed. This paves the way for future experiments with the radioactive beams provided by the SPES facility.

The g factor of the $$12^+$$ K-isomer in $$^{174}$$ W has been measured by means of the time-differential perturbed angular distribution technique as $$g(12^+)=+0.304(11)$$ . In addition, the half-life of the isomer has been remeasured as $$T_{1/2}(12^+)=124(8)$$ ns, in agreement with the literature value and confirming the anomalous hindrance F of the E2 transition to the $$10^+$$ level of the ground state band with respect to the $$\gamma $$ -tunnelling model prediction. The measured g factor has been compared with estimates based on experimental g factors from odd-mass isotopes in the same mass region and with Nilsson model calculations. The results establish unique features of the $$12^+$$ K-isomer in $$^{174}$$ W, which can possess a non-pure intrinsic configuration and/or can be characterised by values of the intrinsic quadrupole moment $$Q_0$$ and the rotational g factor $$g_R$$ significantly different with respect to the majority of K-isomers at mass $$A \approx 180$$ .

The Spes Low-energy Internal Conversion Electron Spectrometer (SLICES) is a new electron spectrometer designed to perform off-beam measurements at the beta decay station of the SPES facility at the Legnaro National Laboratories (LNL). SLICES consists of a large area Si(Li) detector cooled at −150 °C and a magnetic transport system. Four permanent N52 magnets, located around a central photon shield focus the electrons on the detector. In this paper, a detailed description of the SLICES components is presented. The strength of the measured magnetic field has been compared with calculations. The efficiency of the apparatus has been simulated and compared with the experimental data obtained using a radioactive 207 Bi source. The commissioning of the spectrometer at the CN accelerator at LNL is also presented.

In May 1898, worsening economic conditions culminated in demonstrations and brutal military intervention, centered mainly in Milan, known as the Fatti di Maggio. Chapter 6 describes how the carnage of the Fatti di Maggio along with the increased repression that followed set the stage for the most momentous of all the attentats carried out by an Italian anarchist giustiziere: the assassination of King Umberto I by Gaetano Bresci on July 21, 1900. The chapter traces Bresci’s experiences and political evolution within the radical and working class communities in Prato and, after he migrated, in the dynamic anarchist milieu in Paterson, NJ.

Chapter 5 describes the circumstances leading to and the nature of three attentats: Pietro Acciarito failed attempt against King Umberto I, Michele Angiolillo assassination of Spanish Prime Minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Luigi Lucheni’s murder of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. The chapter explains that while Acciarito acted out of desperation shaped by personal economic destitution, Angiolillo’s attentat displayed the characteristics of the anarchist cosmopolitan giustiziere. Like Caserio before him, Angiolillo’s assassination of Cánovas del Castillo, was motivated as a show of solidarity with foreign comrades and as an act of retribution against an individual directly responsible for acts of violence against the innocent. If on a scale of political and moral consciousness Angiolillo’s attentat represents the highest level, the lowest place is occupied by Lucheni’s senseless assassination of Empress Elizabeth of Austria.

Italian anarchists compiled a formidable record of political assassinations during the 1890s: President Marie François Sadi Carnot of France was killed by Santo Caserio in 1894; Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain by Michele Angiolillo in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Luigi Luccheni in 1898; and King Umberto I of Italy by Gaetano Bresci in 1900. No less important were the unsuccessful assassination attempts committed during the same decade: Paolo Lega against Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi in 1894; and Pietro Acciarito against King Umberto in 1897. This book, through a specific focus on attentats along with attempted and successful acts of political assassination, provides a full-length study of the historical, economic, social, cultural and political conditions, the social conflicts and left-wing politics along with the transnational experiences in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland and the United States that led to Italian anarchist violence at the end of the 19th century.

Bombings are traditionally associated with anarchism. Through a brief comparative survey, Chapter 3 explains that while this was a lethal weapon of struggle used by anarchists in Spain and France, the same was not the case for the bombings perpetrated by their Italian comrades. Spanish and French anarchists bombed activities and locations that attracted large numbers of people, especially members of the bourgeoisie. In contrast, instead of an abstract class enemy, Italian anarchists (in whatever country they struck) bombed buildings or targeted specific personalities along with tangible symbols of state power and repressive policies. The determination to strike those held responsible for repressive policies led to two attentats: Paolo Lega’s attempt on Prime Minister Francesco Crispi’s life followed by Sante Caserio’s assassination of the president of France, Marie Francois Sadi Carnot.

The conclusions discusses how political assassinations committed by Italian anarchists were not the product of conspiracies carried out by criminals and madmen. Rather they were the consequence of Italy’s grinding poverty and authoritarian methods of dealing with popular unrest and dissent, of the economic and political pressures that fostered mass migration, and finally, of the cosmopolitan nature of Italian anarchism. All six of the attentatori discussed in this book did not engage in acts of terrorism against faceless victims but instead struck out against those monarchs and chiefs of state deemed responsible, directly or indirectly, for crimes perpetrated against themselves, the people, or the anarchist movement.

The first part of Chapter 7 describes the efforts by Italian authorities in conjunction with US local, state and Federal officials to root out the culprits who presumably had conspired with Bresci to plot King Umberto’s assassination in the United States. The second part analyzes the circumstances surrounding Bresci’s death by strangulation in prison. While authorities claimed that Bresci had taken his own life, based on the available evidence, the chapter lends credence to the view that Bresci was murdered on the orders of Interior Minister Giovanni Giolitti.

Chapter 2 explains the role of government repression as the primary precipitant of Italian anarchist violence. Specifically it describes how, in a climate of growing economic hardship and social unrest among the peasantry and factory workers, in 1878 Giovanni Passanante’s failed “tyrannicide” of King Umberto I provided Italian authorities with a justification to attempt to deliver a mortal blow to socialism and the International. Repression took various forms. Socialists and anarchists groups were dissolved, their newspapers suppressed, rank-and-file members classified as “malefactors” and subjected to ammonizione (admonishment) and domicilio coatto (internal exile). Important anarchists were arrested and those who escaped detention, as in the case of Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, forced into exile. These developments led many anarchists to embrace anti-organizational forms of revolutionary ideology and practices that rejected all forms of organization and exalted terrorist violence.

Chapter 1 highlights the continuity between the Risorgimento and Italian anarchist activities during the movement’s formative years. Specifically, it describes how anarchist violence based on insurrections, guerrilla warfare and tyrannicide was an amalgam of two revolutionary ideologies and traditions inherited from the Risorgimento: the revolutionary democracy of Carlo Pisacane (specifically his articulation of “propaganda of the deed,”) Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi along with lesser known republicans, and the anarchist socialism introduced into Italy by Mikhail Bakunin.

In Italy anarchist bombings along with the attentats of Lega and Caserio provided the pretext for an intensification of repression. Chapter 4 details the measures adopted under Francesco Crispi’s draconian rule directed against the country’s progressive forces—republicans, socialists, and anarchists. The chapter describes the legislation approved in 1894 that allowed the government to escalate the clampdown of political subversion and public unrest. These “exceptional laws” further curtailed freedom of the press and made it possible to subject thousands of subversives and malfattori to ammonizione, trial by military courts and domicilio coatto in penal colonies. Finally, these repressive measures forced anarchist leaders who were not in detention to flee into exile.

Customarily both in Europe and the United States, government officials, the press and historians have described late 19th century anarchists as murderous, bloody thirsty, irrational and wretched individuals The introduction details how the book will show that “propaganda of the deed,” as conceived and carried out by Italian anarchists, was the product of the revolutionary tradition of the Risorgimento; the influence of Russian anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin; the role of government repression in Italy, France and Spain; along with the experiences of Italian migrant laborers at home and abroad. Finally, the introduction described how the book will also provide biographical portraits and analysis of the major Italian perpetrators of political assassinations in fin-de-siècle Italy, France, and Spain.

In October 1967, early in the Nigerian Civil War, government troops entered Asaba in pursuit of the retreating Biafran army, slaughtering thousands of civilians and leaving the town in ruins. News of the atrocity was suppressed by the Nigerian government, with the complicity of Britain, and its significance in the subsequent progress of that conflict was misunderstood. Drawing on archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic and interviews with survivors of the killing, pillaging and rape, as well as with high-ranking Nigerian military and political leaders, S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli offer an interdisciplinary reconstruction of the history of the Asaba Massacre, redefining it as a pivotal point in the history of the war. Through this, they also explore the long afterlife of trauma, the reconstruction of memory and how it intersects with justice, and the task of reconciliation in a nation where a legacy of ethnic suspicion continues to reverberate.

International audience; A new segmented particle detector, SPIDER, has been designed to be used as an ancillary device with the GALILEO γ-ray spectrometer, as well as with other multi-detector γ-ray arrays that will be available at LNL in the future (e.g. AGATA). To commission the SPIDER-GALILEO experimental setup, a multi-step Coulomb excitation experiment was carried out with a 240 MeV beam of (66)Zn produced by the Tandem-XTU accelerator at INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro. The measured particle and γ-ray spectra are compared with the results of detailed GEANT4 simulations which used the Coulomb excitation cross sections, estimated with the computer code GOSIA, as an input. The preliminary results indicate that precise transition probabilities will be obtained which are essential for solving discrepancies reported in the literature for this nucleus.

This article explores the consequences of a massacre of civilians in Asaba, a town on the west bank of the river Niger, during the early stages of the Nigerian civil war. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of the Igbo-dominated Biafra, remaining part of the ethnically diverse midwest region. In the international memory of the war, the midwest action, which claimed several thousand lives, has been eclipsed by the catastrophic events east of the Niger, after the federal blockade of Biafra. This article sheds new light on the human cost of the war on civilian populations outside Biafra. Drawing on interviews with survivors and their descendants, we describe the killings, pillaging and rapes that followed the arrival of the federal troops, and trace the long-term impact and memory of the physical and human devastation in Asaba on family structure, gender roles, educational opportunities and social structure. We show how the official suppression of the massacres, coupled with Biafran awareness of the ev...

In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. Through the reconstruction of this event, the article fills a significant gap in the historical record and contributes to the discussion on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. It also suggests that the Asaba massacres speak to larger issues of potential reconciliation that extend beyond Asaba and Nigeria. Resume: Au debut du mois d'Octobre 1967, quatre mois apres le commencement de la guerre civile au Niger, les troupes federales ont massacre des centaines de personnes a Asaba, un bourg au sud est du Nigeria sur la rive ouest du Niger. Bien qu'ayant une majorite ethnique Igbo, Asaba n'appartient pas geographiquement au Biafra, domine par les Igbos. Avec la reconstruction de ce massacre, cet article comble un vide significatif dans les archives historiques et contribue a la discussion sur l'impact de la memoire traumatique au niveaux local et national. Il indique egalement que le massacre d' Asaba recouvre des questions plus larges de reconciliation potentielle s'etendant au-dela d'Asaba et du Nigeria. On the afternoon of October 5, 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War over the secession of the predominantly Igbo region east of the Niger River, Nigerian federal troops entered Asaba, a town on the west bank of that river. As one witness recalled, We had been expecting their arrival with fear and trembling since Biafran troops started withdrawing on the third of October. We remembered vividly the fate of our people in Northern Nigeria in May, July and September 1966 and the threat that Ibos were going to be wiped out. When the Federal troops arrived some people had fled across the Niger, some into the bush but some remained in their homes, waiting for what fate would bring.* When the troops appeared, the worst fears of the ten thousand townsfolk were realized. Over the next few days, up to one thousand Asabans died at the hands of the federal soldiers, the majority in a single, systematic massacre of men and boys on October 7. The killings at Asaba, as well as smaller events at other towns in the Midwest, remained little known outside Igbo communities for many years, largely because they went unreported in the press at the time and subsequently received scant attention in histories of the Civil War. Our goal here is to reconstruct the history of the events, primarily using survivor accounts in the absence of other primary documents. We suggest that a fuller accounting of the Asaba massacres not only fills a significant gap in the historical record, but also helps us understand more completely the subsequent development of the Civil War. In particular, we argue that the unsuccessful Biafran incursion west of the Niger, and the subsequent atrocities committed against civilians by federal troops, became a major factor in confirming the rhetoric of genocide that hardened Biafran resolve and disastrously prolonged the war. In addition, our work will contribute to scholarship on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. Background to the Civil War Although a full history of the Nigerian Civil War is beyond the scope of this article, a brief overview is needed to place the Asaba events in context. The origins of the war lie in the country's colonial past. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century and over a period of forty years, the British took control of previously independent territories with distinct languages, religions, and customs, from the Bight of Benin along the coast, to the fringes of the Sahara Desert in the north. In 1914 the Colonial Office decided to amalgamate this complex ethnic mosaic into a single entity called "Nigeria" by joining the British colony of Lagos with the Protectorates of Southern Nigeria and Northern Nigeria. …

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.ISBN: 978-88-7438-101-2; International audience; The experimental setup GAMIPE used for gyromagnetic factormeasurements at Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro and a recent experimentalwork regarding K-isomers in 174W are described. Aim ofthe experiment is to study the detailed structure of the isomeric stateswave functions, by the measurement of the magnetic dipole moments.This piece of information can provide interesting hints for theoreticalmodels. Preliminary results concerning the population of the isomersof interest and half-lives are presented.

A decade-long project on the migration of Italian laborers around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries points to the methodological challenges, theoretical debates, and some of the rewards of transnational analysis of class, ethnicity, and gender in the making of modern national states. Analyses of internationally mobile laborers historicize current transnational studies, problematize the historiography of national groups, and reveal how profoundly—and usually also how “nationally”—every multiethnic nation-state understood relations among ethnicity, race or color, class, and gender.

We offer a transnational and comparative analysis of the "nationalization" of foreign-born workers in western nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 An analysis of this complex historical moment is an important foundation for assessing present-day fears of the imminent collapse of nation states. Canadians and Italians wrestling with demands for regional autonomy; German and French voters opting for a "fortress Europe" united against new waves of migrations; and Americans anticipating the disintegration ofthe United States into ethnic and religious fragments, often believe that today's nation states face unprecedented threats to their unity. In fact, nation states have long faced competition from regional loyalties (Weber) and from the cultural diversity produced by international migrations and the globalization ofcapital (Potts; Cohen, New Helots; Strikwerda). In the past, they also faced internationalist labor movements dedicated to ending capitalist oppression around the world in all its forms. To trace the nationalization of foreign-born workers in the past, we focus on 19 million migrants who left the "geographical expression" called Italy between 1815 and 1940.2 Italians dispersed more widely than other Europeans seeking work in these years.'1 Half or more of migrant men began work as temporary, unskilled laborers on railroad and street construction, and in the mines; Italian women tended initially to remain at home. By 1940, Italian migrants and their descendants lived in both North and South America, in several European countries, as well as in Australia, and in North Africa. By examining Italian workers' experiences worldwide, we point both to transformations shared by migrant workers of other backgrounds and to considerable variation in the character ofstates with many foreigners in their workforces. The dynamics of class in an internationalizing economy provide the starting place for understanding the nationalization of Italian workers. Social relations between educated and poorer Italians, and among workers of many nationalities, shaped every phase of the