| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

La formazione degli Stati Uniti (The formation of the United States). By Arnaldo Testi. (Bologna: Mulino, 2003. 259 pp. Paper, €16, ISBN 88-15-09110-6.) In Italian.

Arnaldo Testi's La formazione degli Stati Uniti is a lucid, compact, and fascinating synthesis of the first century of our history. The author argues that it was not until the retreat from Reconstruction that the United States clearly defined its own nationhood. Testi sketches the colonial period in order to lay out the ambiguous legacy of the Revolution and the issues that remained to be settled in the turbulent years ahead. He particularly notes the tension between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the one celebrated equality and political and economic freedom for all, while the other limited direct democracy, left unsettled the debate on the balance of power between state and federal government, and facilitated African slavery and Indian dispossession.

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