Susanna Delfino (University of Genoa)

Making, unmaking, remaking America… The title of this first Milan Group "Quaderno" might well be assumed as the Group’s Manifesto. It is in fact extraordinarily fit to illustrate the whole range of ideas - inspirations and aspirations - that lay behind its founding and have informed its agenda over the past twenty years.

Not only did we want to understand how America - as it presented itself in 1980 - was ‘made,’ but what alternatives there might have been (or had tried to be). We wanted to do this by ‘unmaking’ long-established historiographic assumptions still strongly influenced by a theory of American exceptionalism according to which only Americans could authoritatively interpret and write their own history. And we hoped to contribute to ‘remaking’ the image of American history.

To European – and Italian - scholars in American history, this perspective sounded not only alluring but also much-needed, dissatisfied as they were with the relatively modest impact that the approaches and methods of the European schools of social history – despite interest in E.P. Thompson - had had on American historiography during the Sixties and early Seventies.

An important feature of the Milan Group was, from its inception, to promote comparative studies. The second symposium, held in 1984 ("The Souths and Their Transformations"), constituted in fact a pioneering attempt (the next was 13 years later) to offer indications for a comparison between the Italian and the U.S. Souths. This comparative twist was very welcome to European scholars, who believed that an opening of the intellectual frontiers between Europe and America, with its attendant cross-fertilization of ideas, would contribute to a better understanding of the histories of both continents by providing new perspectives on the interplay between the larger historical processes involving the western world and each specific national context. And I would like to point out here how pervasive and challenging this commitment to comparative reflection was, for it literally forced all of us into previously unblazed dimensions across time and space.

With hindsight, now that the bias of exceptionalism seems to have subsided in the American historical consciousness; now that the comparative approach is widely acknowledged as a valuable asset and research tool by many practitioners; now that studies abound on the material lives, work and culture/s of ordinary people – whether white or black, native or immigrant - of antebellum America, we can see how the original three major expectations have been fulfilled.

The 1980s was a crucial decade for the definitive affirmation of these developments within American historiography, and the Milan Group was in the forefront of this transformation through its function as a gathering point and discussion forum for dozens of scholars who, although working in diverse disciplinary fields and on disparate subjects, shared the same belief in the need to break with traditional compartmentalisations, both chronological and disciplinary, and open up intellectual frontiers. Of frontiers, both material and imagined, other panelists will speak today.

Let me now illustrate how the scholarly contributions included with the "Quaderno 1" meet the points I have made so far.

First of all, they collectively document the continuity of a discourse going on among participants in the Group’s activities since the very first Symposium, held in 1982 with a title "Society and the Republic, 1790-1850" – suggested by Eric Foner - aimed at discussing how ‘the people’ in the widest and most articulated meaning of the word, perceived and defined the ‘Republic’ and their relationship to it. This line of investigation found full deployment in the 1986 symposium ("Making, Unmaking and Remaking America") which concerned itself with the huge debate taking place in the mid-Nineteenth century United States about ‘what America should be,’ in the light of the massive social and economic changes engendered by the industrial revolution. One major issue emerging from this reflection, as Loretta Valtz Mannucci points out in her introduction to the volume, was the role played by selective memory in shaping ideas of the Republic and in defining the terms of republican citizenship. Thus, the ‘making’ and the ‘remaking’ of America also involved, in important ways, the formulation of competing constructions of the memory - both individual and collective, private and public - of what and who was worth of being remembered about the founding of the Republic and its later life. This theme would constitute the topic of the 1992 symposium.

What the reader gets from these essays is not merely a picture of the varieties of reform proposals advanced in America during those decades but a sense of the complexity and multi-faceted nature of reformism. Conservative reform, largely promoted by the bourgeoisie, aimed at re-stabilizing society in the light of the important transformations under way (as in the case of the sabbatarians, the temperance societies, the Bible societies, the Sunday schools, and the like) whereas structural, or radical reform (as advanced by the utopian/communitarian experiments which flourished between the 1820s and the 1850s) challenged established institutions by offering visible alternatives to the nascent capitalist-industrial order. The ambiguity of the bourgeois strand of reformism is well illustrated both by Stephen Nissenbaum’s and Luisa Cetti’s contributions ("Sexual Radicalism and the Contested Norm" and "The Radicals and the Wrongs of Marriage: The Rutland Free Convention of 1858"), which deal with contemporary public discussions on sexuality and marriage, and by Bob Gross’s ("A Majority of One: Counting Consciences in Concord") perceptive analysis of the sharp insider critique Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau turned upon the reform movements of their day as expressions of the spirit of the age, dominated by unbridled commercialism, the rise of the corporation, and the vocabulary of equality brought by Jacksonian democracy. The penetrating critique offered by Emerson and Thoreau shows how rule by the numbers and the calculating mentality of capitalism could ‘also’ produce anti-institutional individualism.

But if individualism was one answer to the danger of "total absorption in the majority" in a society dominated by the rhetorical centrality of the ‘people’, the alternative proposals set forth by utopian philosophies promised other venues, this time communitarian, to reconcile the survival of the individual with the ill effects engendered by the new economic order and the political discourse bolstering it. Another set of essays explores the prospects these proposals (like those theorized by the Icarians, or the Fourierists) had of gaining a foothold in America. In so doing, they cast a bridge between old Europe and America; but not simply in the sense of reiterating the European origin of many ideas and socio-political theories which crossed the ocean and became objects of attention and debate in America. Essays such as those by Roberto Tumminelli, Isabela Rousinowa, Augusta Molinari and Larry Portis ("Etienne Cabet: The Alternative Community in Urban and Rural Settings, or the Adaptation of Theory to Circumstance", "European Utopians in America: The Diary of Kalikst Wolski", "The Last Popular Italian Heresy: Davide Lazzaretti’s Jurisdavidic Church", and "The Twilight of Utopia in France: Amédée Cattey’s ‘Universal Army of Workers’ and the Rise of the Industrial State") push beyond these objective data, trying to provide answers to some major questions. What sorts of analyses of the conditions prevailing in a specific European country led the proponents and supporters of communitarian experiments to privilege the United States as the most congenial turf to put their theories into practice? Why these alternative proposals did not make any substantial inroads in American society? The answers provided in the early 1980s by these authors may well be taken as the confirmation of the advantages of adopting a comparative approach. If Molinari describes the giurisdavidic, millenarian church of Davide Lazzaretti in Italy pretty much in the same terms as American scholars would explain the origins and impact of evangelicalism, i. e., as a religious protest movement which was anti-institutional in the midst of the transformations brought about by the industrial revolution and the formation of a national state, Portis argues that, in the last decade of the Nineteenth century, utopian socialism had exhausted its function in a heavily industrializing France, where economic development had been accompanied by the affirmation of civil and political institutions such as full parliamentary democracy, universal manhood suffrage and institutionalised labor unions, and hints at the role of the late 19^th century industrial state in stifling alternative proposals. These latter contributions well illustrate all the potentials inherent in comparative research. Molinari’s essay, in particular, points to the powerful subversive, revolutionary potential of evangelical religion. Two essays in the collection deal with this topic for the American case. The first, by John Scott Strickland ("From Chiliasm to Community: Religion and Cultural Change among South Carolina Slaves before the Civil War"), analyses how southern slaves, under the pressure exerted by the slaveowners’ opposition, elaborated the initial message of the Great Awakening, laden with apocalyptic and revolutionary overtones, into a millennialism "oriented toward community building…a powerful unifying force for the black community… that would serve as an effective counter to the oppression of slavery". The second essay, by Michael Johnson ("The problem of Reform in the Antebellum South"), explores the meaning and limits of reform in the antebellum South, indicating how the new standards of morality, which had gained wide consensus in the north between the first and second religious awakening, impinged upon southern consciences urging southerners to justify their defence of the peculiar institution in moral terms. The inner conflicts of conscience nurtured by the slaveholders are not easily detectable but, apparently, they succeeded in working out psychological mechanisms of "moral insulation" with respect to the increasingly strict and demanding moral standards prevailing in the North. However, the true limit of reform in the South was represented by the yeoman farmers’ request for wider political participation and the definition of their interests within state politics, which challenged the soundness of their continued support of the slave system.

Finally, two contributions specifically examine the impact of ongoing transformations on women’s lives. In an essay which will become part of her book ("Women of the Laboring Poor in Early National New York"), Christine Stansell argues here that the redrawing of the boundaries of women’s proper place and conduct exerted especially vast negative implications for working class women. Stansell’s essay is complemented by a rather precocious attempt by Liana Borghi ("The Deconstruction of Society in Certain Feminist Novels of the 1850’s") to use the tools of literary analysis to historic ends.

Collectively, the contributions included with the volume underscore one major knot with which all strands of reformism had to come to grips in their attempt at suggesting alternatives to the existing social, economic and political order , i. e., the search for equilibrium between the private and the public sphere in a society where the latter had come to occupy a wider and wider share of the peoples’ lives. They also indicate that this effort passed not only through the reconciliation between individual conscience and public behavior, but also through a more precise definition of the role and function of the individual in the body politic as expressed by a clear determination of the attributes and meaning of citizenship and of attendant rights. A theme, this latter, which is strikingly relevant to contemporary society.