Università Roma Tre

The course is divided into two connected but independent units. The first one centers on the political and social history of the United States from its origins to the present. It includes the analysis of key moments and figures of this evolution as well as a close look at the contemporaneous history of Canada.

First Unit (6 CFU): Contemporary History of North America


Oliviero Bergamini, Storia degli Stati Uniti, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2010


and a volume chosen among the following ones:

- Luca Codignola e Luigi Bruti Liberati, Storia del Canada, Bompiani, Milano 2016
- Ferdinando Fasce, I presidenti USA: due secoli di storia, Carocci, Roma 2008
- Tiziano Bonazzi, Abraham Lincoln, un dramma americano, Il Mulino, Bologna 2015
- David Ellwood, Una sfida per la modernita’. Europa e America nel lungo Novecento, Carocci, Roma 2012
- John Lewis Gaddis, La Guerra Fredda. Cinquant’anni di paura e speranza, Mondadori, Milano 2008
- Raffaella Baritono e Elisabetta Vezzosi, Oltre il secolo americano? Gli Stati Uniti prima e dopo l’11 settembre, Carocci, Roma 2011

The course is divided into two connected but independent units. The second unit, whose title could be “Imagined America”, adopts a mostly cultural approach, focusing on the various perceptions of America constructed both among its inhabitants and in Europe. The dynamics of attraction/repulsion brought about by these ‘images’ of the U.S. influenced relevant historical processes and at the same time revealed deep-root aspects of the cultures of different countries situated on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Second Unit: Imagined America (6 CFU)


Two volumes chosen among the following ones:
Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del Nuovo Mondo. Storia di una polemica (1750-1900), a cura di Sandro Gerbi, Adelphi, Milano 2000 (introduction by Sandro Gerbi and chapters 3, 5, 7, 8)
Emilio Franzina, L’immaginario degli emigranti. Miti e raffigurazioni dell’esperienza italiana all’estero fra i due secoli, Pagus, Treviso 1992
Daniela Rossini, Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy. Culture, Diplomacy and War Propaganda, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2008
Robert W. Ryddell e Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna. The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922, the University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005
Michela Nacci, L’anti-americanismo in Italia negli anni Trenta, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1989
Stefano Rosso (a cura di), L’invenzione del West(ern). Fortuna di un genere nella cultura del Novecento, Ombre Corte, Verona 2010, together with Frederick J. Turner, La frontiera nella storia americana, Il Mulino, Bologna 1953 (introduction and chapters 1 and 9);
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. American Expansion and the Empire of Right, Hill and Wang, New York 1999