Italian Historians Interpret American History

The two volumes under review, although different in character, illustrate the high quality of the scholarship regarding United States history produced by Italian historians in recent decades. In Laformazione degli Stati Uniti, Maria Susanna Garroni, who has an M.A. in American history from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Rome, has written a work of synthesis that, in less than 200 pages, provides a panoramic view of the first century of the Republic. Garroni keeps clearly before her readers the major forces shaping the emerging nation and its distinctive American character. In delineating the contours of social as well as institutional developments, she avoids simplistic interpretations and conveys the complex, often contradictory, nature of historic processes. Throughout the work, Garroni displays a comfortable familiarity with writings by both American and Italian scholars on this period of history. On particular issues, she cites and on occasion differs from leading interpretations. Far from engaging in name-dropping, Garroni deftly weaves such points of view into a coherent thesis. While growth and expansion demographic, economic, territorial are central features of this history, Garroni does not subscribe to a progressive historiography. She takes pains to include those segments of society that did not benefit equally, if at all, from increasing wealth, opportunity, and political freedom. Nor is her America characterized by consensus; themes of conflict class, racial, and sectional -run through the volume. In this respect, Garroni has gone to school to the new social history. She describes the hardening of slavery as an institution and ideology, the loss of autonomy by skilled workers to technology and capitalism, growing divisions between rich and poor, urban riots and tumults, the killing and forced removal of Indians, and the largely failed struggles of women for equality. Still this is by no means a multicultural America-bashing exercise. Garroni is even-handed and sensitive in her analysis of the negative qualities of the new nation. In the instability resulting from migrations, business cycles, and diversity and the consequent psychological anxieties and social insecurities, she discovers the sources of religious bigotry, sectional animosities, racism, and nativism. Garroni also finds in a burgeoning democracy fonts of renewal and reform that challenged such contradictions of the Enlightenment ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Recurring religious revivals unleashed powerful emotional dynamics for personal and societal salvation, spawning movements for temperance, education, abolition, women's rights, and other reforms. Garroni emphasizes how religiously inspired involvement in reform created public spaces for middle-class women that freed them from the constraints of domesticity and separate spheres

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• Strategic Ritualization and Ethnicity

  J David Knottnerus, David G Loconto•Sociological Spectrum•2003

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