1) The first part of the course will be devoted to helping students understand the importance of history as a vehicle not only for knowledge but also as a critical and civic tool for living the present in an informed way.

2) In the second part, an effort will be made to acquaint students with the tools and methods of historians' work, in order to understand what is "behind" the teaching.

3) The third part of the course will provide a brief but critical and interpretative overview of the most relevant issues in contemporary history, from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring, among other things, the links between the historical acceleration of the last two centuries or so and the current times that students find themselves living.

4) In the fourth part, the monographic section of the course will focus on one of the great historical issues of the contemporary age: the development of the mass media, with particular reference to Republican Italy, from the post-World War II period to the present day, investigating above all songs and music as fundamental instruments of public communication, through which to read the more general history of present-day Italy. The musical experiences of the 1960s and 1970s will be examined in a more direct manner, with the emergence of the phenomenon of the so-called 'singer-songwriters': through the evolution of their songs, it will also be possible to reconstruct a political-social and communication history of Italy, in a fundamental period of its contemporary history, from the 'economic boom' to the crisis of the early 1980s.