Blurred Nationalities Across The North Atlantic

Download or read book Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic written by Luca Codignola and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-01-02 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people were frequently moving between North America – specifically, the United States and British North America – and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests, and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New World passed between travellers through word of mouth and letter writing. Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic challenges the idea that national origin – for instance, Italianness – constitutes the only significant feature of a group’s identity, revealing instead the multifaceted personalities of the people involved in these exchanges.