Nations Divided:  America, Italy, and the Southern Question.  By Don H. Doyle. Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series Number 10. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. 130 pages. $24.95 cloth.

      The Southern Question in this intriguing work of comparative history concerns the relationship the nations of Italy and the United States had with their southern regions. Author of works on small places like Lafayette County, Mississippi, and Jacksonville, Illinois, and cities such as Nashville, Don H. Doyle in this book expands his vision to consider two questions: what forces have helped hold together the nations of Italy and the United States, and how has the Southern Question been important in the process of nationhood? This short book, which began as a series of lectures at Georgia Southern University, asks big questions about why these southern regions matter so much in discussions of national identity.
     Doyle writes against a tendency among many current scholars who view nationalism as a fiction imposed by elites to try to keep together people who would otherwise be in conflict. Frequently, according to Doyle, elites’ efforts to create national unity by appealing to an old, shared history fail. Instead, this book concentrates on people’s often changing everyday understandings of national identity in topics such as religion, language, education, holidays, and, significantly, war.
     The United States emerged without old calls for primordial ties among people with shared identities based on common history. Instead, it emerged as a new nation founded on hope for a future based on representative government. Italian nationalism came later, through a complicated series of military, diplomatic, and political events that did not create today’s understanding of Italy until 1870. Calls for Italian nationalism came from various sources, some emphasizing past greatness in the Roman Empire or the Renaissance, others stressing hopes for a liberal republic, some hoping for some combination of the two.
     The Southern Question has differed in the United States and Italy. In the United States, of course, the South tried to form its own nation. In recent years in Italy, it has been the Northern League that called for secession from what its members see as the economically parasitic southern regions of Sicily and Naples. But there are strong similarities as well. Both Souths seem, in the consciousness of their nations, poor, slow, and strange in both customs and political organization. As Doyle writes of 19th-century Italy, "The idea of a civilized North and a barbaric South took on important meaning for the way in which the former would govern the latter" (71). In the U.S., issues concerning slavery and free labor became central to broad demands for American unity based on political rights. The intriguing issue, in both cases, was how Americans and Italians could unify politically with people they considered different in significant ways and whose difference, in fact, helped sustain some understandings of national unity.
     This book does not answer all of the big questions it raises. No volume of about 100 pages could do so. But by tracing the parallel stories of the American and Italian Southern Problem, Doyle’s volume encourages broad thinking about regional questions in our global age. He ends with a brief conclusion that contrasts the bitter and violent divisions of contemporary Europe with the difficulties but also the promise of the American Civil War: separatism fails, often with bloody results, but inclusive visions of nationalism, no matter how sloppy, how pragmatic, how intellectually vague in definition, continue to offer great potential. As Doyle begins his final paragraph, "The American Union that Lincoln struggled to preserve offered a model of how peoples of remarkable diversity might learn to live together peacefully" (95).

TED OWNBY