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USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
The History of the United States in Italy: Generations in Dialogue – Special Issue in Celebration of Tiziano Bonazzi's 80th Birthday
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2020-10-22
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Angela Santese
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The History of the United States in Italy: Generations in Dialogue – Special Issue in Celebration of Tiziano Bonazzi's 80th Birthday
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Special Issue: Introduction                     USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11637                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




                       The History of the United States in Italy:
       Generations in Dialogue – Special Issue in Celebration of
                              Tiziano Bonazzi’s 80th Birthday


                                            Published: November 10, 2020




     In May 2020, with the support of the Inter-University Center of Euro-American History and Pol-
itics (CISPEA) and the U.S. Embassy in Rome, the conference “The History of the United States in
Italy: Generations in Dialogue” was to be held at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at
the University of Bologna to celebrate the 80th birthday of Professor Emeritus Tiziano Bonazzi at the
University of Bologna. From the publication of his first research project, (Il sacro esperimento. Teologia e
politica nella America puritana, Bologna, 1970), up to his most recent books on the American Revolution
and Abraham Lincoln, he has made an important contribution to the development of American Stud-
ies not only in Italy. As a scholar of US intellectual and political history, Tiziano Bonazzi has taught
for several years in important American universities and has thoroughly investigated the political and
scientific culture of the United States, the complex historical relationship between institutions and pol-
itics, the role of Protestantism in shaping American politics and society, the intellectual and cultural
exchanges between the United States and Europe, ultimately contributing to the growth of American
History within Italy, which has been fully included in international academic debate.
     The conference that was conceived as an opportunity for discussion between different generations
of Italian scholars of American History, was cancelled due to the health emergency caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic. With the organizers — Raffaella Baritono, Matteo Battistini and Angela Santese
— we decided to ask the invited speakers and discussants to publish their papers and comments. The
result is this special issue that provides an important illustration of current attitudes and approaches
to the study of American History by the new generation of Italian scholars. Their essays highlight
research trends and historiographical practices that reveal elements of continuity, but also substantial
changes from the scholarship of the older historians with whom these authors grew up, in dialogue.
     The special issue is organized in three round tables, dealing with political and social history, intel-
lectual history and international history.
     In the first round table on political and social history, Lorenzo Costaguta casts light on the Amer-
ican socialists’ efforts to grasp the nexus of class and race in the labour struggles of the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, showing how their racial thinking shifted from “scientific racialism” to



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The History of the United States in Italy: Generations in Dialogue – Special …   USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




“colour-blind socialism.” Giuliano Santangeli Valenzani examines the promotion of tourism in Al-
abama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina from 1976 to 1981, with the underlying exploitation
of black heritage in the South — in particular the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement — used to
lure African American visitors from other parts of the country.
     In the second round table on intellectual history, Serena Mocci focuses on Margaret Fuller, the
pioneer of white American reformism and the women’s movement, by analyzing the dispatches she
sent from Italy from 1848 to 1849. Francesca Cadeddu explores the life, thought and faith of Anna
Howard Shaw and her contribution to the Social Gospel Movement. Both essays deal with a critical
theme in women’s history, namely, the deconstruction of the Victorian cultural paradigm of the “sep-
arate spheres.” Matteo Rossi reviews the recent historiography that has enriched the stagnant debate
about if and when the United States became an empire, by outlining a cluster of categories — empire,
state and market — which were indispensable for reconstructing the role of the United States in the
world prior to the American Century through the political thought of Henry Charles Carey. As part of
broader research that intends to outline the institutional implementations of participatory democracy,
Marta Gara reconstructs the literature regarding participatory democracy during the Long Seventies,
providing a framework for navigating the public use of the political keyword for the “movement of
movements.”
     In the third round table on international history, Gaetano Di Tommaso focuses on the entangle-
ment of natural resources and national security in the politics and culture of the Progressive Era,
arguing that geologists and natural scientists working for the Department of the Interior were the
first to grasp the reason for a “control” of supply. Dario Fazzi retraces his research path by starting
from his first study on the nuclear arms race “from the point of view of those who opposed it.” He
also introduces a research agenda on the social, cultural, economic, and environmental impact of U.S.
military bases in Europe throughout the Cold War. Angela Santese highlights the intermingling of
pacifism, anti-nuclearism and environmentalism during the Reagan administration, underlying the
impact of the antinuclear movement. She then introduces a research project that looks at the history of
Greenpeace, investigating it as a political and social manifestation of environmentalism. Alice Ciulla
analyses the attitude of American experts and policymakers towards the Italian Communist Party
during the 1970s as a part of her broader project regarding the Italian Communist Party in the wider
context of Euro-communism. Alessandra Bitumi discusses Jacques Delors’ narrative battle against
“Reaganomics,” showing how the former President of the European Commission has nurtured Eu-
rope’s exceptionalist self-perception and contributed to shaping America’s understanding of the Old
World.
     These essays cannot obviously provide an exhaustive sample of the new historiographical trends in
American History on a European scale, but they offer a stimulating view of how transnational changes
in the practice of American history are working within a new generation of (not only) Italian scholars.
As all the discussants — Ferdinando Fasce, Stefano Luconi, Cristina Bon, Arnaldo Testi, Matteo Battis-
tini, Marco Mariano and Federico Romero — highlight, these young historians have been influenced
and, at the same time, contribute to the main historical processes that have affected American histori-
ography since the cultural and transnational turn of the Eighties, which involved the internationaliza-
tion of American History and the contamination of different perspectives of historical research. Gone
are the days when American History in Europe was organized along national lines. Even though the
nationality of scholars still matters in terms of a cultural and an academic context, the decline of the
nation-state as the prevailing unit of analysis, and the increasing mobility of scholars across Europe,
places new generations of scholars along lines that cross not only geographical, but also disciplinary
borders. The methodological — almost political — disputes around strict and exclusive definitions
of historical fields that featured historiography in the last century do not characterized new research,
or at least not significantly. The struggles that pitted social versus political history, bottom up history
versus top down history, and cultural history toward economic and institutional history have been
replaced by blending topics, methodologies and perspectives. What prevails is the interplay of the
social and the political, the cultural and the economic, the national and the international by picking
up social actors and political groups, collective movements and intellectuals, scientific and political
discourses and public opinion, governmental and non-governmental institutions and policies.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11637                                                                 2
The History of the United States in Italy: Generations in Dialogue – Special …   USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




    If the multifaced centre of gravity characterizing the new American History in (not only) Italy
put aside the traditional approach to international history, political and intellectual history, the essays
of this special issue represent an ultimate challenge to American exceptionalism in historiography
that previous generations of scholars have led by stating the peculiarity and importance of American
history outside of the United States. Scholars like Bonazzi have not only improved American history
in the Italian academic environment, but they have also opened windows of dialogue with United
States historians by constantly comparing and enriching their academic world. From this perspective,
although the historical approaches of the essays presented here follow very different trajectories in
intellectual as well as methodological terms, not one of them is fundamentally distant from Bonazzi’s
research on American, political and scientific cultures. As Ferdinando Fasce writes in his commentary
by quoting one of Bonazzi’s overviews of American historical studies in the peninsula, an “Italian
dimension” of American History is still alive and well. There seems to be no better way to celebrate
Tiziano Bonazzi.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11637                                                                 3
