Bøker av Don H. Doyle

"John Wilkes Booth fired his fatal shot on the evening of April 14, 1865, and as the news reached nearly every corner of the globe, President Abraham Lincoln lay dying. Pervasive sympathy for America-and the martyred Lincoln-provoked restless agitation for democratic reform on both sides of the Atlantic. While most readers are familiar with Reconstruction as a deeply contested domestic struggle, Viva Lincoln: The Legacy of the Civil War and the New Birth of Freedom Abroad by historian Don H. Doyle explains how the Union victory helped drive European imperialism from the Americas, bring slavery to an end in Latin America, and spark a wave of democratic reforms in Europe. The 1860s proved to be a crucial decade in the history of democracy. While Reconstruction reforms were implemented to establish the American South on firm republican principles; internationally, a contagious flurry of democratic reforms and revolutions in Britain, Spain, France, and Italy made democracy the wave of the future. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Doyle argues, the United States had forsaken the main achievements of Reconstruction as new theorists and politicians reconciled democratic principles and white supremacy in the new Jim Crow era. The United States, once a model of democratic reform, became a model for mass segregation, racialized disenfranchisement, and immigration restriction. Grounded in extensive diplomatic correspondence, US and foreign legislative debates, international newspapers, and hundreds of speeches, memoirs, biographies, contemporary books, and pamphlets, Viva Lincoln will be the first general-interest global history of Reconstruction from Lincoln's assassination to Jim Crow"--

In Nations Divided, Don H. Doyle looks at some unexpected parallels in American and Italian history. What we learn will reattune us to the complexities and ironies of nationalism. During his travels around southern Italy not long ago, Doyle was caught off guard by frequent images of the Confederate battle flag. The flag could also be seen, he was told, waving in the stands at soccer matches. At the same time, a political movement in northern Italy called for secession from the South. A historian with a special interest in the long troubled relationship between the American South and the United States, Doyle was driven to understand the forces that unite and divide nations from within.The Italian South had been at odds with the more prosperous, metropolitan North of Italy since the countrys bloody unification struggles in the 1860s. Thousands of miles from Doyles Tennessee home was an eerily familiar scenario: a South characterized in terms of its many perceived problems by a North eager to define national ideals against the southern other. From this abruptly decentered perspective, Doyle reexamines both countries struggle to create an independent, unified nation and the ongoing effort to instill national identity in their diverse populace. The Fourth of July and Statuto Day; Lincoln and Garibaldi; the Confederate States of America and the secessionist dreams of Italys Northern League; NAFTA and the European Union-such topics appear in telling juxtaposition, both inviting and defying easy conclusions. At the same time, Doyle negotiates the conceptual slipperiness of nationalism by discussing it as both constructed and real, unifying and divisive, inspiration for good and excuse for atrocity.Americans like to think of themselves as being innocent of the vicious ethnic warfare that has raged in the Old World and over so much of the globe, writes Doyle. Europeans, in turn, enjoy reminding Americans of how little history they have. This enlightening, challenging meditation shows us that Europeans and Americans have much to learn from the common history of nationalism that has shaped both their worlds.