Ellison From the Heart of Europe

Abstract

The use of birth and rebirth as a trope to represent historical change or to demarcate historical periods is not new. But the metaphor has held the USA in a particularly tight grasp since the late nineteenth century. At the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the fires that forged the USA’s present sense of modernity burned particularly hot. The country’s identity as a modern place with modern people is partially bound up with the ascendant valuation of rational, scientific modes of inquiry and industrial capitalism. Alongside this industrial modernity, American scholars and industrialists also yoked the country’s identity to newly forged intellectual ties to classical Renaissance antiquity. It is in the late nineteenth-century historiography of Jacob Burckhardt and his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1867) that we first find the identification of the Italian medieval period as a “renaissance.” And as Jonathan Arac writes in “F.O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance”, Burckhardt’s intellectual influence had an effect on the way Americans undertook classical studies as well as the way Americans saw themselves connected to the ancient past (94).

It is not simply the birth of the nation we now commemorate but its regeneration … We have little hesitation in predicting that the effects of the revolution though which we are now passing upon European politics will be still more marked than the effects of the revolution of 1776.

-The Nation (1865)