Enrico Dal Lago. William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini

In this parallel biography of two giants of mid-nineteenth-century political reform, Enrico Dal Lago continues his long-standing, productive comparisons of Italian unification and the United States' abolition of slavery. Dal Lago argues that United States abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini found “much common ground” in “a struggle for national freedom, whether from slavery or from foreign oppression” (p. viii). From their births in 1805, Dal Lago moves chronologically through the two men's lives, placing them always within currents of nationalism, liberalism, and antislavery activism. The book's signal contribution may be the excavation of the methods they used to build movements in the mid-nineteenth century. In fairly remarkable lockstep, Garrison and Mazzini started journals and local organizations in the early 1830s, were radicalized by stays in prison, developed continental and global movements later in the 1830s, and struggled during the 1840s and 1850s with challenges from other radicals.

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