Baseball and the War on Terror

Michael L. Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism

Arnold A. Schmidt, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

from the publisher:

Making extensive use of untranslated texts, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism analyzes the incorporation of Byron’s life and works into Italian political discourse during the risorgimento, unification, and the two world wars. Italian authors appreciated his celebration of liberty and nationalism so much that between 1818 and 1948, they referred to Byron more than to any other non-Italian poet. Arnold Anthony Schmidt explores the intellectual milieu of Byron’s Italian years, his participation in Grand Tour and salon culture, his influence on Italian Classicists and Romantics, and his importance in constructing Italy’s national identity.

A Nation of Speechifiers

Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

from the press:

In the decades after the American Revolution, inhabitants of the United States began to shape a new national identity. Telling the story of this messy yet formative process, Carolyn Eastman argues that ordinary men and women gave meaning to American nationhood and national belonging by first learning to imagine themselves as members of a shared public.

She reveals that the creation of this American public—which only gradually developed nationalistic qualities—took place as men and women engaged with oratory and print media not only as readers and listeners but also as writers and speakers. Eastman paints vibrant portraits of the arenas where this engagement played out, from the schools that instructed children in elocution to the debating societies, newspapers, and presses through which different groups jostled to define themselves—sometimes against each other. Demonstrating the previously unrecognized extent to which nonelites participated in the formation of our ideas about politics, manners, and gender and race relations, A Nation of Speechifiers provides an unparalleled genealogy of early American identity.

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