This panel seeks to reassess aspects of the relationship between the Italian Renaissance and American history. The two are usually joined at the hip in the classic narrative of “Western Civilization.” The conventional interpretation states that, following the fall of Rome a dark age descended upon Europe until the Italian Renaissance reignited European minds and culture. Those Italians then passed their inspirations and studies onto English Protestants who then brought Renaissance ideals with them to the Thirteen Colonies. American history was born. The power of this story continues to influence the United States today, evident in scholarship, public school curricula, public policy, and conceptions of American identity at home and in the world. Whatever their specific conclusions, most people, including specialists, simply assume there is a relationship between the Italian Renaissance and the United States.

However, Americans before 1900 did not see the same connection. During the 1800s many viewed people from around the Mediterranean basin with open disdain. They held racist views about the darker complexions of Mediterranean peoples and harbored additional prejudices against their Catholicism. This was especially true for Spain and Italy. Nineteenth-century texts consistently condemned Spain as woefully inferior to its northern European neighbors, but Italy could not be dismissed so easily. Nineteenth-century Americans, in particular, understood their largely Protestant heroes to be inspired by Italian politicians and intellectuals, and they admired Italian art; indeed, early American museum collections sought out Italian art deliberately. How did Americans reconcile their deeply held prejudices with their admiration for Italy’s past? How did Italy, and especially the Italian Renaissance, influence both the Western narrative and the history of the United States?

This panel brings together three papers to examine these questions. In the first paper, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio explores views of Italy and Italians held by Americans living abroad in the nineteenth century. Most of these Americans were drawn to Italy because of its cultural heritage, but their prejudice against Italians was so deeply entrenched it even influenced their attitudes to Italian food. In the second paper, Brian Maxson uses the case study of a fifteenth-century manuscript to chart the changing relationship between American and Italian history. In the mid-1800s American collectors sought to distance their Italian objects from their original contexts. However, the solidification of the narrative of “the West” in subsequent decades permitted the reassociation of their collectibles with the newly admired Italian Renaissance. The third paper then turns to the larger narrative of Western Civilization as often articulated or reified by its rejection in modern scholarship. The paper critiques the traditional conception through a case study of a learned humanist influenced by fifteenth and sixteenth-century rhetorical forms in Europe, active in early modern Mexico, and writing about political events in China.