Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity

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 move...