"In Nations Divided, Don H. Doyle looks at some unexpected parallels in American and Italian history. What we learn will reattune us to the complexities and ironies of nationalism.".

"The Italian South had been at odds with the more prosperous, metropolitan North of Italy since the country's bloody unification struggles in the 1860s.

Thousands of miles from Doyle's Tennessee home was an eerily familiar scenario: a South characterized in terms of its many perceived problems by a North eager to define national ideals against the southern "other." From this abruptly decentered perspective, Doyle reexamines both countries' struggle to create an independent, unified nation and the ongoing effort to instill national identity in their diverse populace. The Fourth of July and Statuto Day; Lincoln and Garibaldi; the Confederate States of America and the secessionist dreams of Italy's Northern League; NAFTA and the European Union - such topics appear in telling juxtaposition, both inviting and defying easy conclusions.

At the same time, Doyle negotiates the conceptual slipperiness of nationalism by discussing it as both constructed and real, unifying and divisive, inspiration for good and excuse for atrocity."--BOOK JACKET.