International nationalism: World history as usable past in nineteenth-century United States culture

This study argues that specific moments in world history inspired nineteenth-century U.S. writers to grapple with issues fracturing their nation in their own day. Although scholars arguing for a transnational turn in American studies juxtapose the internationalism they prioritize with what they view as a bankrupt multiculturalist critique that emphasizes minority cultures within the nation, nineteenth-century international nationalists used the global past precisely to come to grips with internal problems plaguing the national body. Thus in Chapter One, the figure of eighteenth-century Venice allows James Fenimore Cooper to write back against his fears about the anti-republican tendencies emerging in the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Margaret Fuller, too, finds Italy in the age of the Risorgimento a reminder of the moral declension of her homeland, caught as it was in the throws of its war with Mexico and the evils of slavery. In Chapter Two, the importance of religious liberty to William of Orange and the Dutch during their revolt from Spain raises the specter of anti-Catholic groups like the Know-Nothings in reviews of John Lothrop Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. In Chapter Three, the limits of imperial analysis are illustrated by means of William Hickling Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru. Although Prescott's popular history of the Mexican conquest became absorbed into the imperialist mindset of the U.S. war with Mexico, his characterization of pre-conquest Peru as essentially a welfare state indicates a concern with property rights in his own culture, which were under attack from utopian socialists and abolitionists challenging Southern slaveholders' right to hold property in slaves. Finally, in Chapter Four, the theory that Vikings had maintained a settlement in what would become New England allowed the displacement of the history of Native American land possession in the area. This same dynamic governed the plagiarism controversy that enveloped Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, in which he was charged with stealing from the Finnish epic Kalevala in a move that obscured the poem's significant debt to native culture.