Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity

Central to the book's new American studies approach, those narratives of American universalism and exceptionalism, embedded as they were in paintings, sculpture, cartoons, fiction, memoirs, and especially newspaper and periodical correspondence, performed cultural work. Namely, debates about revolutionary Italy's potential for responsible self-government were both illustrative of, and helpful in shaping explosive domestic conflicts over race, religion, and ethnicity, and the capacity marginal groups had for full republican citizenship in the United States.