| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth-Century Perspectives. Ed. by Maurizio Vaudagna. (Turin: Otto, 2007. 403 pp. €13.00, ISBN 88-95285-02-6.)
This collection of fifteen essays by Americanists at Italian universities exhibits the fresh insight and intellectual flair we have come to associate with our overseas colleagues. The book's unifying theme is the concern that, while the examination of the American impact on European life has become a dominating preoccupation across the Atlantic, the analysis of the place of Europe in twentieth-century American history has, mainly as a consequence of the turn toward sociocultural topics and national introspection since the 1960s, suffered serious marginalization.	1
Tiziano Bonazzi begins this balance-redressing collection in classic Mediterranean style with a creative discussion of myth, metaphor, and image. Is America Prometheus or Sisyphus? Is the appropriate historical model a Rome restored or a Greece reborn? Or are we simply contemplating "a mythological being called America whose nature is supposed to be contained in a cluster of metaphors arranged around a pivotal symbol: freedom" (p. 12)? Too much wind in the sails? Bonazzi quickly throws the anchor. This turns out to be a cogent and reassuringly down-to-earth discussion of the Declaration of Independence, which he reinterprets as a widely influential "Atlantic" document broadly reflecting rising popular participation, the emergence of the modern state, and the realization of Enlightenment universalism.	. . .

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