An American in Rome during the Risorgimento: Reforms and Manifest Destiny in Margaret Fuller's Dispatches from Rome (1847-1849)

Abstract

This essay aims to offer new insights into the controversial relationship between nineteenth-century women reformers and American exceptionalism by presenting the case of a pioneer of white American reformism, Margaret Fuller, and the dispatches she sent as a journalist from Italy during the 1848 revolutions and the establishment of the Roman Republic in 1849. It will illustrate how Fuller used the revolution in Italy to redefine “the contours of the nation and its shifting borders with the foreign,” and to reaffirm the same exceptionalism underlying the creation of the American “Empire of Liberty.”