The Idea of America in Italy’s Two Nations

The Conclusion provides a final assessment of the book’s in-depth examination of the perception and influence of American culture in Italy. It is divided into four parts. The first one dwells on the most surprising discoveries brought about by research for this book in relation to both the pre-First World War period and the Fascist dictatorship. The second part addresses the controversial term ‘Americanization’ and discusses whether the influence of American culture in Italy was inevitable. The third part looks at the connections between this study and the development of the presence of American culture in the post-Second World War years. The fourth and final section underlines the revealing perspective that was made possible by the chronological span of this book, moving back to the nineteenth century and thus allowing a clear perception of the centrality of French culture for Italy’s educated elite. It also dwells on the book’s connection between the development of mass culture and the arrival of American artefacts and manufacturing techniques at the start of the twentieth century. The Conclusion ends with a comment on a 1930 letter by literary author Cesare Pavese reflecting on the leading role taken by American culture during the interwar years.

The arrival of Islam in Italy in the seventh century led to cultural acculturation and changes in several areas of life, such as literature, culture and language. The aims of this study are to: (1) Describe the process of the arrival of Islam in Italy; (2) Describe the influence of Islamic and Arabic culture in Italy. and (3) explaining the development of Arabic science and literature in Italy. This research is included in the descriptive qualitative research with a literature study approach and the data collection techniques used are reading techniques and note-taking techniques. The results of this study are: (1) The process of the arrival of Islam in Italy began when Caliph Othman bin Affan sent the prime minister Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan to attack Sicily in 652 AD. (2) There are traces of Islamic culture in the architecture of the city in the form of narrow alleys that follows the ancient Arabic style of the city of Amalfi, and the assimilation of Italian words of Arabic origin is close to 300 words; And (3) in the development of scientific and literary journals, Muslim scientists have certainly produced various major works which later became references for Western scientists. Besides that, Arabic literature also entered and developed in Sicily which became a heaven for scholars such as al-Jabr wa Maalaka, Firdaus al-Hikmah, Al-Hawi. Apart from that, Arabic literature also entered and developed in Sicily, becoming a paradise for scholars, such as the story of Layla Majnun which was outlined in the book The Secretum by Petrarch and ST. Augustine.

Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, The Significance of the Frontier in American History; the other took place in William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, The Wild West. Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians - and bloody battles - at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as 'Custer's Last Stand'. Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices - those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American. Generously illustrated, engagingly written, and peopled with such unforgettable characters as Sitting Bull, Captain Jack Crawford, and Annie Oakley, The Frontier in American Culture reminds us that despite the divisions and denials the western movement sparked, the image of the frontier unites us in surprising ways.

“Un-Southern”: Buffalo Bill, the Texas State Centennial, and Texas’s Western Turn Jacob W. Olmstead (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney with her sculpture of William F. Cody, The Scout. Photograph taken in 1924. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, USA: P. 69.0517. [End Page 370] In the early months of 1936, Texans began preparations for the celebration of the Texas Centennial. Many communities sponsored local monuments, fairs, pageants, and rodeos. With a mandate and funding from the Texas state legislature, the state also planned to host a World’s Fair-type exposition to promote the history and progress of the Lone Star State. After a rigorous competition, the state’s Centennial Commission selected Dallas to host the main exposition. The palatial fairgrounds, dubbed the “Magic City,” featured voluminous pavilions in the Art Deco architectural style of the 1930s, broad walks and midways, and monumental works of art highlighting salient themes and individuals in Texas history.1 Three months before the gates opened in Dallas, a controversy erupted and cast a long shadow over much of the year’s festivities. On February 22, 1936, Centennial officials announced that a bronze replica of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s The Scout, a sculpture of Colonel William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, would greet visitors at the entrance of the new Hall of Fine Arts on the Centennial grounds.2 The life-size statue depicts a mounted Cody with a rifle in one hand and pulling the reins tight as he [End Page 371] inspects the ground for Indian tracks.3 Several Dallas-based Confederate commemorative groups, believing that Buffalo Bill served during the Civil War as a Union spy, swiftly denounced the decision. Such sectional outcries stood in stark contrast to the progressive and exceptional state that Texas Centennial planners hoped to introduce to Americans during the celebration.4 Indeed, most Texans no longer collectively identified themselves as primarily southern. In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Texans had become more aware of the value of their state’s exceptional past. The legacy of throwing off the rule of an oppressive dictator and the heroes of the Alamo was much more palatable and useful by the early twentieth century than the defeatism of the Lost Cause ideology championed in the South. The embrace of the revolutionary past signified Texans’ growing identification with the history and symbols of the American West rather than those of the South.5 This reorientation eventually exhibited itself in the consumption of western art, architecture, music, and film.6 Not surprisingly, themes and images promoted by the state during the Centennial also skewed western.7 A stylized cowboy, complete with six-shooter, chaps, spurs, and waving a ten-gallon hat, became the principal icon for the celebration.8 To be sure, many Texans had not fully let go of their southern roots—a point illustrated by the objections to the Buffalo Bill sculpture. Though not as prominent, the Confederate flag and statues to the Confederacy’s leaders were exhibited during the Centennial year around the state and on the Centennial grounds.9 But like the physical landscape of the Magic City, the cognitive landscape of most Texans now made more room for Stephen F. Austin, Jim Bowie, cattle drives and cowboys, and Spanish missions. By the 1930s the “conscious and unconscious distancing of a people from the South of defeat and poor expectations” could not be turned back.10 [End Page 372] Identification with the South stood in sharp contrast to the western symbols and ideals many Texans were now embracing. These symbols and ideals were not only emblematic of the West, but the United States in general. Simply put, Texans had become western and quintessentially American, while southerners remained sectional and un-American.11 Historians have well documented the reshaping of Texas’s civic memory and identity from southern to western and the role the Texas Centennial played in that process.12 These, as well as other memory studies, have also demonstrated the power of celebrations and monuments to shape public memory.13 Still, the row over the prominent placement...

Scholars have not been slow to notice the collisions and contradictions presented by and represented in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Alan Trachtenberg depicts it as the culminating spectacle of The Incorporation of America in the nineteenth century. Richard Slotkin examines the Fair as the high point in the performance history of "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" and traces the show's role in the creation of the Gunfighter [End Page 589] Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Richard White explores the connection between "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill" and representations of The Frontier in American Culture that offered images of peaceful or of violent conquest (Turner presented his "frontier thesis" at the American Historical Association convention during the Fair and William F. Cody's "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" performed next to the fairgrounds). Historians of the Fair itself and of organizations contributing to it (such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Indian Affairs) have produced a rich literature often critiquing the Fair's racist and sexist organization and displays, while historians of Buffalo Bill and wild west shows examine the man, the productions, their performers, their publicity, and their impact upon U.S., indeed international, culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A substantial scholarship has also taken up Frederick Jackson Turner and the impact of his view of American history. Many studies written recently about these subjects reflect a revised view of United States history, and specifically of "the frontier," indebted to scholarly research exposing much that is deplorable about the policies and behavior of the U.S. government and white Americans toward Amerindians. 2

Annie Oakley and the Disruption of Victorian Expectations Lisa Bernd (bio) This ongoing project to consider the legacy of Annie Oakley's performances began when I came upon a framed poster of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in the lobby of the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma. I was surprised when the images made me recall my own childhood in suburbia. Despite the fact that I grew up on Long Island during the 1970s, I had played cowboys and Indians, always insisting on impersonating Annie Oakley. This play scenario was perhaps the closest I came to being treated as an equal among the neighborhood boys. Letting me play with their cap pistols and ride my invisible horse next to theirs, they allowed me to be the hero—after I had finished cleaning up the cabin, of course.1 Ironically, by framing my play within gender expectations that included domestic chores, I was able to experience what performance theorist Peta Tait labels "moments of freedom" from those expectations—moments where I was able to run with the boys and capture (or even be) the "bad guy."2 As a female sharpshooter, Annie Oakley traveled the world precisely because she could do a "man's work" while appearing to adhere to the conventions of Victorian femininity. By framing her own "moments of freedom" in gendered gesture and behavior, Oakley was fundamental to the construction of a modern "American" identity for women. Modeling authority and self-sufficiency, as well as a spiffy pair of pantaloons, Annie Oakley influenced American women while fostering the national enterprise of cultural unification. Theorizing that "the Wild West" was an effort toward the creation of a national identity, I consider the way Annie Oakley's presence cultivated an American identity for women by embodying freedoms typically denied to women in the Victorian era. [End Page 39] Although Oakley refused to align herself politically with the feminist movement, her dress, actions, and associations resulted from the freedom she experienced as a performer, especially as a woman doing "man's" work. That her audience came to accept and idolize her speaks volumes about her ability to disrupt audience expectations to accommodate social change. If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, nations are "imagined communities," then it was particularly important, at the end of the nineteenth century, for the United States to establish itself firmly in the imaginations of its own inhabitants as well as Europeans. Buffalo Bill's theatrical representation of frontier life offered an alternative to the prevalent European ethno-linguistic model of nationalism.3 The late nineteenth century proved a highly volatile period of European nationalism as groups constantly tried to partition territory according to historical ethnic demographics. Without ethnicity or history in common, cultural diversity and regional divisions were seen as the U.S.'s biggest threat to a cohesive nation. Clearly, however, the violent and oppressive dynamic of colonialism implicit in the "taming" of the frontier demonstrates that, for the United States, nationalism was not a matter of political self-determination but, ironically and inescapably, one of cultural recognition in a world where homogeneous ethnicity was "the decisive or even the only criteria of potential nationhood."4 No wonder, then, that international cultural expositions of all kinds flourished during this period. In the United States, a site of multicultural and multiethnic inevitability, those expositions often took the form of "Wild West" shows that deliberately capitalized on the exotic composition of its diversity. Buffalo Bill Cody ran the largest and most popular Wild West show. His show included a cast and crew of over 600 as well as 400 horses. At one point, the show played 131 locations in 190 days. Incongruously, despite his own participation in the destruction of Native American culture, Buffalo Bill's show supported the idea that cultural diversity contributed to the strength of the nation. Roger Hall, in Performing the American Frontier: 1870-1906, argues that by framing the appearance/participation of Native Americans within a context of education and "cultural" enrichment and highlighting the contributions of diverse peoples in the "Rough Riders of the World" act, Buffalo Bill defended the United States's multicultural existence while other struggling nations clearly...

This book examines the influence of American culture in Italy during the decades between unification in 1861 and the implosion of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in July 1943. During this period the country witnessed large-scale social and economic modernization as well as an unprecedented explosion of mass culture. Focusing on six key fields of study—the press, literature, cinema, music, radio and the comics industry—the book traces a gradual shift from the hegemonic influence of France on Italy’s highbrow culture to the emergence of the USA as a new transnational model of modernity, able to address all social classes. This phenomenon coincided with the mass migration of Italians, whose hopes for a better life across the ocean produced a positive image of America that was largely at loggerheads with a more dismissive reaction from Italy’s educated elite. By tracing the presence of American culture in Italy, this book offers new perspectives on the development of Italian culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also offers a thorough revision of how Mussolini’s regime responded to American culture, from jazz music to Hollywood films, and dismisses the myth of a fundamentally anti-American totalitarian regime. While scholarship to date has focused on the pervasive influence of American culture in the aftermath of the Second World War, this book tells the story of its first arrival, at a time when the French model was still dominant and Italy was beginning to embrace modernity and mass culture. The book is divided into two parts, each containing five chapters: Part One is entitled ‘The Discovery of America, 1861–1919’, while Part Two covers ‘America in Fascist Italy, 1922–1943’.

Reviewed by: The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America patricia p. chu (bio) The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. By Rajini Srikanth. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). In The World Next Door, Rajini Srikanth has kneaded together two different kinds of study. Not content to survey and describe an emerging literature, the author has folded readings of mostly fresh, mostly undiscussed South Asian North American texts into a sustained five-part essay on the roles of writers, readers, scholars, and activists in the current political situation. For her, this new literature requires readers to reconsider their reading habits and to reflect on the habits of Americans in "reading" their nation and others' as texts; such scrutiny is most urgent in the wake of U.S. government responses to the events of September 11. Thus, she engages with debates about the profiling of Muslims, Arabs, and others portrayed as terrorism suspects and about ideas of America and its place in the world. In Asian American studies, she responds to debates about the relative merits of demanding social justice for Asian Americans in the U.S. vs. the task of understanding Asian Americans as global citizens negotiating with racial projections emerging from the nation's rise as a global power. The book does introduce contemporary South Asian cultural texts, but it's not organized around these texts so much as issues raised in reading them. The author questions most of the assumptions that have framed Asian American literary studies, leaving readers with new questions to explore and define this changing terrain. Bibliophiles will rejoice in the dozens of titles, including fiction, poetry, performance art, and plays that Srikanth discusses, including underrepresented Muslim voices. For scholars of Asian American culture "East of California," Srikanth resituates South Asian literature with neither a center nor a margin, but a global web of diasporic communities that touch such places as India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Trinidad, Canada, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. Finally, [End Page 207] for scholars of American culture and womens' studies, Srikanth's book proposes broad questions useful for considering American culture as the U.S. attempts to redefine its role abroad. After explaining her use of the contingent categories, "South Asian American writing" and "North America," Srikanth shifts focus from single sites to the "interconnectedness among nations and peoples," and the interaction between acts of literary writing and reading and transforming the realms of "politics and civic behavior." Quickly sketching the emergence of American awareness of India and the emergence of South Asian America literary texts, Srikanth establishes that her primary focus will be on texts published after Salman Rushdie's watershed novel Midnight's Children (1980). Inveighing against "partial" (biased, incomplete) readings, the author offers two suggestions for "just" readings: a caution against bipolar thinking, and a demand to read "as foreigners to the text," acknowledging our limited knowledge of other cultures. Srikanth cites Bapsi Sidhwa, Tony Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, and Arundhati Roy as writers who explore and appreciate the defining traumas of other nations, a task she feels Americans must undertake if we seek other nations' support. For Srikanth, the prevailing "idea of America" is based on John Winthrop's view, in 1630, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city on the hill" for the world to emulate; she quotes his words as definitive of the future nation's self-image as uniquely favored by God, driven by the desire for religious freedom, equality, and democratic values rather than mere material prosperity, and therefore justified in such acts as massacring "four hundred Pequots during the Pequot War of 1637" (35). Economic motives are typically muted by such ideologues, but, through Benjamin Franklin, are recast as the secular business values of "reason, industry, . . . an eye for the practical," and personal and national self-sufficiency (35), setting the stage for U.S. exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. Srikanth then contrasts this image of America's uniqueness with the complex webs of connection in Amitav Ghosh's memoir/history/novel, In an Antique Land, which links twelfth- and twentieth-century exchanges between Egypt and India with Iraq's 1990 invasion of...

At the turn of the 20th century many Native Americans took part in white man's enterprises: first Wild West shows, then silent movies. Wild West shows toured not only the United States but the Old World as well, including the south-eastern edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among the Native Americans who performed in Europe particularly visible were the Lakota (western Sioux) who performed, among others, in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The most famous of these Lakotas was Sitting Bull who had led his people's military resistance against encroaching white Americans a decade beforehand. Sitting Bull joined the Buffalo Bill's show for 1885 season. In 1890, the Sioux and other tribes lived a great religious awakening that was named Ghost Dance, hoping that by performing the Ghost Dance ritual they would make their lives better and get rid of the white men who took their lands, put them in reservations, broke treaty promises and brought hunger and diseases. On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was killed by Indian Police in front of his cabin at the Standing Rock reservation. Two weeks later, on December 29, 1890, at least two hundred, but perhaps as many as three hundred, Lakotas were killed in the tragic battle (that soon turned into a massacre) at Wounded Knee or died in its aftermath. A few months later, almost one hundred Lakotas, including those who survived Wounded Knee massacre, joined the Buffalo Bill show during its second European tour. In 1902 they participated in the third European tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, now called Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. I will discuss the show as well as the Native American performers and their reception while the show travelled among Polish cities during the summer of 1906, almost at the end of that tour. Delving into Polish press of that period, I will attempt to demonstrate how the Polish press made various, sometimes quite unexpected uses of the show.

The Introduction addresses some of the key aspects related to the overall context and rationale of this book. It is divided into two parts. The first one—‘The Academic Context’—provides an overview of the range of studies dedicated to American culture in Italy and situates the current book as filling a distinct gap in the study of the arrival and perception of American culture in Italy during the post-unification decades. The second part—‘Questions of Methodology’—dwells on the multidisciplinary make-up of the book. It defines the cultural fields that are at the centre of this study—the press, literature, cinema, music, radio, and comics magazines—after which it moves to a discussion of both the methodological choices relating to the organization of the book and the significant presence of more than a hundred illustrations as a complementary part of the book’s written narrative.

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1845–1917) is recognized as probably the world’s most legendary Indian fighter, scout, and Western hero. During and since World War II cinematic representations of this remarkable figure have served to define shifting perceptions of heroism, showmanship, and the mythology of the Wild West. Director William Wellman’s romanticized or celebratory wartime portrait of “Buffalo Bill” in the eponymous movie Buffalo Bill (1944), to take but one example, features Western star Joel McCrea as Cody and Thomas Mitchell as Ned Buntline. In an invented scene, the unassuming Cody, denounced as a fraud in the New York press after his stage appearances, is reduced to performing as a sharpshooter on a wooden horse in the Wonderland [Dime] Museum, until being rescued by his estranged eastern wife (Maureen O’Hara). Promoted as an “action-packed movie” that, during wartime, “celebrates the rugged individualism of the man who represents the frontier spirit,” Buffalo Bill is visually splendid in Technicolor but otherwise quite commonplace.1

This is a notable book about a very important American and westerner, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. It is also an illuminating examination of the varied meanings of Cody's traveling arena show, the Wild West. More than any previous scholar, Louis S. Warren sees Buffalo Bill in the large, shifting sociocultural contexts (c. 1860–1915) of the United States and western Europe. The W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, Warren has written a thorough, thoughtful, and valuable study, which now stands as the best investigation of this emblematic westerner. Throughout his lengthy volume, Warren shows how Buffalo Bill's depictions of his life and his West were a series of “artful deceptions.” Marrying fact and fantasy, Cody sought to dramatize the achievements of American civilization and some of its ambiguous losses. The author convincingly concludes: Hailing from a West that was practically a borderland between real and fake, full of charlatans posing as heroes and of everyday people invited to assume heroic poses, [Buffalo Bill] … learned the allure of that tense space between authentic and copy, regeneration and degeneration. (p. 543)

This conversation with Anna Maria Mori aims to reconstruct, through the testimony and the memories of a prominent pioneer of women’s journalism, the feminization of news making practices and cultures in Italy. From a twenty-first century perspective, the interview will retrace the evolution of women’s access to careers in Italian journalism, bringing to light the undeniable progress and the persistent areas of criticality, the asymmetries between the increasing presence and visibility gained by women journalists and their enduring underrepresentation when it comes to leadership positions in the newsroom. Having covered many different roles during her long career, which has developed through the daily press, women’s magazines, radio and television, Mori is the ideal interlocutor for the specific intent of this interview.

Reviewed by: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi Devin Thomas O'Shea (bio) stamped from the beginning: the definitive history of racist ideas in america Ibram X. Kendi Bold Type Books https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/ibram-x-kendi/stamped-from-the-beginning/9781568585987/ 608 Pages; Print, $19.99 Like Bertrand Russel's The History of Western Philosophy (1945), Stamped from the Beginning is a hulking 584-page narrative archeology of ideas. [End Page 89] Professor Ibram X. Kendi's argument lays out three competing ideologies which reveal themselves during discussions of race in America dating back to pilgrim days. First, there are segregationists who place non-white people in a fundamentally different category than themselves. Then there are assimilationists who largely believe non-white people could improve, and become whiter, if only they would straighten up a little. Finally, there are antiracists who believe these distinctions between races and cultures are largely bullshit. Russel's history of ideas traces a (fairly) straight line through schools of western thought which builds from one thinker to another. Eventually, Russel comes to the consensus that we've entered a brand-new school of thought, and in that way, philosophy progresses. So too for America's racist ideas—they move from body to body throughout history and evolve. Professor Kendi de-centralizes these ideas through many voices while also selecting a touchstone historical figure to represent an era. For example, pre-Revolutionary America is the realm of Cotton Mather. Mather's conception of race is a matter of religion; he was abnormally progressive in that Cotton believed slaves were human enough to be baptized. From there, we move to the era of founding fathers where Thomas Jefferson gets no gloss. Kendi's work is astounding for its breath of historical understanding; the sections on Jefferson and W. E. B. Du Bois seem especially familiar to the writer. Any question that Jefferson had realized something about slavery later in life (an idea I've read about often) is debunked. The only change in Jefferson's mind seems to be about how attractive Black women are. First they aren't attractive, then there's an epiphany sometime after Sally Hemmings, but there is no deathbed revelation. Kendi navigates pre-Civil War America through William Lloyd Garrison, and transitions to Du Bois for Reconstruction up through the Civil Rights Movement. From that point forward, the book moves at a gallop to cover ground including Sista Solider, The Bell Curve (1995), and Ferguson. Angela Davis is our touchstone intellectual who brings us up to the present, and while Davis's philosophy is covered well enough, this is the section of Stamped that feels hurried. It's bound to feel that way—this is the case with all projects that set out to account for hundreds of years of history. Eventually, the historian crosses a threshold where the debates are no longer dead. The [End Page 90] form changes, and suddenly Professor Kendi is explaining the recent ancestry of our modern debates. At the time of writing, Kendi is under the impression that the most dangerous racist idea of the Obama era is that we live in a post-racial society. That idea, Kendi argues, is what prevents antiracist action in the United States; modern producers of racist ideas have been working to put up "a portrait of America conveying that there was no longer any need for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies—and no longer any need to ever talk about race." There's no mention of Trump except for the introduction to the paperback edition (which I think Professor Kendi could have cut since the body of the book stands so well on its own). The US has historical amnesia, and by following the three ideologies—assimilationists, segregationists, and antiracist—Professor Kendi shows how language, profit motive, and technology keep racist ideas alive. These forces also de-claw antiracist efforts. Each step of "progress" in fact finds new ground to exploit. For example, the first half of the book concerns itself with religious ideas transitioning into scientific ideas. The debate over the souls...