What makes a nation--and who belongs to it?

In Nations Divided, Don H. Doyle looks at some unexpected parallels in 
American and Italian history. What we learn will reattune us to the 
complexities and ironies of nationalism. During his travels around southern 
Italy not long ago, Doyle was caught off guard by frequent images of the 
Confederate battle flag. The flag could also be seen, he was told, waving in 
the stands at soccer matches. 

At the same time, a political movement in northern Italy called for secession 
from the South. A historian with a special interest in the long troubled 
relationship between the American South and the United States, Doyle was 
driven to understand the forces that unite and divide nations from within. 

The Italian South had been at odds with the more prosperous, metropolitan 
North of Italy since the country's bloody unification struggles in the 1860s. 
Thousands of miles from Doyle's Tennessee home was an eerily familiar 
scenario: a South characterized in terms of its many perceived problems by a 
North eager to define national ideals against the southern "other." 

>From this abruptly decentered perspective, Doyle reexamines both countries' 
struggle to create an independent, unified nation and the ongoing effort to 
instill national identity in their diverse populace. The Fourth of July and 
Statuto Day; Lincoln and Garibaldi; the Confederate States of America and the 
secessionist dreams of Italy's Northern League; NAFTA and the European 
Union--such topics appear in telling juxtaposition, both inviting and defying 
easy conclusions. 

At the same time, Doyle negotiates the conceptual slipperiness of nationalism 
by discussing it as both constructed and real, unifying and divisive, 
inspiration for good and excuse for atrocity. "Americans like to think of 
themselves as being innocent of the vicious ethnic warfare that has raged in 
the Old World and over so much of the globe," writes Doyle. "Europeans, in 
turn, enjoy reminding Americans of how little history they have." This 
enlightening, challenging meditation shows us that Europeans and Americans 
have much to learn from the common history of nationalism that has shaped 
both their worlds.
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"A wise, elegant, and erudite analysis of the meaning of nationalism in the 
modern world. This is comparative history of high quality." 

--George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University
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Don H. Doyle is Nelson Tyrone Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt 
University. He is coeditor of The South As an American Problem (Georgia) and 
author of such books as Faulkner's County and New Men, New Cities, New South.