Professor of History, Don Doyle of Vanderbilt University will be lecturing in Italy:
November 26, University of Rome III 
November 27, University of Genoa 
November 27, Italian-British Association in Genoa 
November 28, University of Bologna 
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Don H. Doyle, _Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern
Question_ University of Georgia Press, 2002  ISBN ISBN 0-8203-2330-6

Description: 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.

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.