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The American Revolutions Of 1848 Summary

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Andre Fleche’s first-rate study of how the European revolutions of 1848 influenced the American Civil War arrives amidst recent calls by scholars to internationalize the history of America’s great conflict.[1] Fleche argues that the legacy of the 1848 revolutions influenced Union and Confederate conceptions of nationalism, as the competing sides participated in the “transatlantic dialogue” (p. 3) over the definition of the modern nation-state. Americans believed that their revolution provided an example for the world, and used the success or failures of subsequent European revolutionary struggles to measure the viability of American republicanism as a world model. The continental breadth of the 1848 revolutions, in addition to the thousands of influential European immigrants that came to America in their wake, made these revolutions the most salient for American observers. Fleche contends that examining the Civil War …show more content…

In the 1850s, American audiences welcomed prominent revolutionaries, but as these exiles waded into American politics, Northerners and Southerners argued over how the legacy of 1848 should shape domestic disputes. Hungarian hero Louis Kossuth won cheers for praising America’s revolutionary legacy, but managed to irritate abolitionists by sidestepping slavery, and conservative Southerners by calling for escalated American intervention in European revolutionary affairs. Irish nationalist John Mitchell earned Southern applause by linking his support for Irish self-determination to a defense of slavery and Southern self-government. German forty-eighters like Carl Schurz, however, claimed that slavery spawned landholding aristocrats similar to the ones revolutionaries tried to overthrow in

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