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When antebellum Americans talked about the contemporary struggle for Italian unification (the Risorgimento), they were often saying more about themselves than about Italy. In Domesticating Foreign Struggles Paola Gemme unpacks the American cultural record on the Risorgimento not only to make sense of the U.S. engagement with the broader world but also to understand the nation's domestic preoccupations. Swayed by the myth of the United States as a catalyst of and model for global liberal movements, says Gemme, Americans saw parallels to their own history in the Risorgimento--and they said as much in newspapers, magazines, travel accounts, diplomatic dispatches, poems, maps, and paintings. And yet, in American eyes, Italians were too civically deficient to ever achieve republican goals. Such a view, says Gemme, reaffirmed cherished beliefs both in the United States as the center of world events and in the notion of American exceptionalism. Gemme argues that Americans also pondered the place of 'subordinate' ethnic groups in domestic culture--especially Irish Catholic immigrants and enslaved African Americans--through the discourse on Risorgimento Italy. Thus, says Gemme, national identity rested not only on differentiation from outside groups but also on a desire for internal racial and cultural homogeneity. Writing in a tradition pioneered by Amy Kaplan, Richard Slotkin, and others, Gemme advances the movement to 'internationalize' American studies by situating the United States in its global cultural context.

Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars,Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome. The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and \"other\" kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday-a momentary escape from the familiar-but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged. Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe Marble Faunhas a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was \"part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.\" The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer. Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts,Roman Holidaysis an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.

Understanding long-term changes in human well-being is central to understanding the consequences of economic development. An extensive anthropometric literature purports to show that heights in the United States declined between the 1830s and the 1890s, which is when the U.S. economy modernized. Most anthropometric research contends that declining heights reflect the negative health consequences of industrialization and urbanization. This interpretation, however, relies on sources subject to selection bias. Our meta-analysis shows that the declining height during industrialization emerges primarily in selected samples. We also develop a parsimonious diagnostic test that reveals, but does not correct for, selection bias in height samples. When applied to four representative height samples, the diagnostic provides compelling evidence of selection.

As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking conflicting responses: some modern artists and intellectuals embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, whereas others aspire to modernize by \"killing the moonlight\" of Venice, in the Futurists' notorious phrase. Spanning the history of literature, art, and architecture—from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover—Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new. Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, the book redrafts the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.

This book reviews the period from the unification of Italy to the fascist era through significant Neapolitan performers such as Gilda Mignonette and Enrico Caruso. It traces the transformation of a popular tradition written in dialect into a popular tradition, written in Italian, that contributed to the production of \"American\" identity.

Caterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a significant era for both the United States and the Kingdom of Italy during which both countries commenced to seek new ways of expansion. The United States, which was economically much stronger and technologically more developed, declared its rising hegemony by the end of the nineteenth century. Italy, which lacked the economic and social resources that the United States possessed, strived to become a colonial power until the first decades of the twentieth century. This review of some of the Italian primary sources about the Spanish-American War clarifies noteworthy aspects of imperialism–both American and Italian–within that global context.

What sustains slavery, and why at critical junctures—the fall of the Roman Empire, the early modern expansion of plantation agriculture, the later phases of the industrial revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s—has it often expanded or contracted so rapidly? Why have elites sometimes been united, but sometimes violently divided, over the choice between free and servile labor? Why has slavery usually been ended by legal prohibition rather than voluntary abandonment? An extremely simple dual-equilibrium picture can illuminate how, when, and with whose support slavery is introduced or abolished. Internal divisions over slavery are likely to be most intense as a society approaches either of these \"tipping points.\" The most striking example, explored fleetingly here, is the US Civil War.

From the last third of the 19th century until soon after the turn of the 20th century, Italy (with the exception of Spain) was the site of Europe's largest anarchist movement. Mikhail Bakunin, the progenitor of modern anarchism, first found wide-spread support in Italy, and, while there, from 1863 to 1867, he published his seminal writings, which remain the framework for anti-organizational, libertarian anarchism. Italian intellectuals, notably Carlo Pisacane and Errico Malatesta, contributed to the development of anarchist theory. In the United States, anarchism persisted longer and had more effect in the Italian immigrant community than elsewhere. Most significantly, it challenged (for a time successfully) Fascist hegemony in the multitudinous Little Italys where the vast majority of Italian Americans resided. Marcella Bencivenni's Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States 1890–1940 sheds new light on the culture (both as production/consumption and as a way of life) of the Italian radical movement, especially its anarchist wing, in America. Bencivenni's presentation of the culture of Italian American radicalism explains, despite the anarchist communities' inability to sustain a larger movement and consolidate victories, the appeal of anarchism in the Italian immigrant community, and by extrapolation in other working-class constituencies.