Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions

In this accessible, scholarly account, historian Fitz reframes early U.S. history in light of American perceptions of Latin American revolutions during the early 19th century. As an insurgent Latin America toppled European tyranny and embraced republican forms of government, onlookers in the U.S. reacted to these breakthroughs with enthusiasm and support—including naming towns and children after the liberator Simón Bolívar, providing arms, and volunteering as armed adventurers—as well as plenty of self-aggrandizement, often viewing their own anticolonial conflict and subsequent embrace of republicanism as the primary impetus for the entire hemisphere’s revolutionary developments. However, as Latin American insurrections went beyond republicanism and toward abolitionism, the continuing proliferation of slavery and tightening racial hierarchy within the U.S. exposed the limits of the American Revolution and soured Americans’ enthusiasm for their southern neighbors. Fitz argues that a previously unrecognized turning point occurred in which a “racialized strain of nationalism” based on U.S. white exceptionalism began to develop, in which the U.S. perceived itself as the “white, moderate, and prosperous exception to a hemisphere bursting with incompetent, aggressive, antislavery radicals.” This study, based on strong academic foundations and written with captivating and elegant prose, is an impressive achievement that suggests intriguing origins of American exceptionalism. Illus. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Strothman Agency. (July)