Our Sister Republics
The United States in an Age of American Revolutions
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the James H. Broussard First Book Prize
PROSE Award in U.S. History (Honorable Mention)
A major new interpretation recasts U.S. history between revolution and civil war, exposing a dramatic reversal in sympathy toward Latin American revolutions.
In the early nineteenth century, the United States turned its idealistic gaze southward, imagining a legacy of revolution and republicanism it hoped would dominate the American hemisphere. From pulsing port cities to Midwestern farms and southern plantations, an adolescent nation hailed Latin America’s independence movements as glorious tropical reprises of 1776. Even as Latin Americans were gradually ending slavery, U.S. observers remained energized by the belief that their founding ideals were triumphing over European tyranny among their “sister republics.” But as slavery became a violently divisive issue at home, goodwill toward antislavery revolutionaries waned. By the nation’s fiftieth anniversary, republican efforts abroad had become a scaffold upon which many in the United States erected an ideology of white U.S. exceptionalism that would haunt the geopolitical landscape for generations. Marshaling groundbreaking research in four languages, Caitlin Fitz defines this hugely significant, previously unacknowledged turning point in U.S. history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this accessible, scholarly account, historian Fitz reframes early U.S. history in light of American perceptions of Latin American revolutions during the early 19th century. As an insurgent Latin America toppled European tyranny and embraced republican forms of government, onlookers in the U.S. reacted to these breakthroughs with enthusiasm and support including naming towns and children after the liberator Sim n Bol var, providing arms, and volunteering as armed adventurers as well as plenty of self-aggrandizement, often viewing their own anticolonial conflict and subsequent embrace of republicanism as the primary impetus for the entire hemisphere's revolutionary developments. However, as Latin American insurrections went beyond republicanism and toward abolitionism, the continuing proliferation of slavery and tightening racial hierarchy within the U.S. exposed the limits of the American Revolution and soured Americans' enthusiasm for their southern neighbors. Fitz argues that a previously unrecognized turning point occurred in which a "racialized strain of nationalism" based on U.S. white exceptionalism began to develop, in which the U.S. perceived itself as the "white, moderate, and prosperous exception to a hemisphere bursting with incompetent, aggressive, antislavery radicals." This study, based on strong academic foundations and written with captivating and elegant prose, is an impressive achievement that suggests intriguing origins of American exceptionalism. Illus.
