Publisher description

This book investigates the relationship between the ideas of nation and race among the nationalist intelligentsia of the Italian Risorgimento and argues that ideas of race played a considerable role in defining Italian national identity. The author argues that the racialization of the Italians dates back to the early Napoleonic age and that naturalistic racialism—or race-thinking based on the taxonomies of the natural history of man—emerged well before the traditionally presumed date of the late 1860s and the advent of positivist anthropology. The book draws upon a wide number of sources including the work of Vincenzo Cuoco, Giuseppe Micali, Adriano Balbi, Alessanro Manzoni, Giandomenico Romagnosi, Cesare Balbo, Vincenzo Gioberti, and Carlo Cattaneo. Themes explored include links to antiquity on the Italian peninsula, archaeology, and race-thinking.

This volume grew out of a conference held at the Warburg Institute of London in June 1989 in memory of Charles B. Schmitt. The topic, one to which he had given much thought, was the ways knowledge changed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, in terms of how it was classified, how it was transformed in science, philosophy and theology, and how it was institutionalized and how it was distributed. Contributions by an international group of scholars, Grazia Tonelli, Claire J. Farago, Charles Lohr, Allison Coudert, Nicholas Jardine, Lynn S. Joy, Robert Black, Susanna Akerman, Michael Hunter, and Jeremy D. Popkin treat different aspects of the topic. The editors, Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin have added an introduction and an epilogue.

This book examines comparatively how the writing of history by individuals and groups, historians, politicians and journalists has been used to "legitimate" the nation-state agianst socialist, communist and catholic internationalism in the modern era. Covering the whole of Western Europe, the book includes discussion of: * history as legitimation in post-revolutionary France * unity and confederation in the Italian Risorgimento * German historians as critics of Prussian conservatism * right-wing history writing in France between the wars * British historiography from Macauley to Trevelyan * the search for national identity in the reunified Germany.