There are two factors in the Revolution and the Risorgimento during the nineteenth century which have dictated the organization of this book and conditioned as well the presentation of its contents. One is the advent of a revolution which, abortive in r849, threatened continually thereafter to break out again; the second is the ideology of a ruling class, whose basic funds of values and conscious aims were abruptly and profoundly altered by the sudden appearance of revo lution and the equally swift decay of this same movement. From these two points of view it becomes mandatory that the story of the Risorgimento and the Revolution commence in the year r848. The mastery of the Revolution, as one sees with hindsight, was attained by r861. That achievement, not frequently recognized for what it was in terms of motivation and historical necessity, is of central interest in this book. I have consequently sought to give a rather full picture of events, with particular attention for the internal politics of the revo lutionary countries involved. The attitude of a class of men, threatened in their lives and in their property, is the attitude of the counter-revo lution. There was a willingness to accept revolutionary progress out of the need to direct its course.

For years, historians have argued that Catholicism in the United States stood decisively apart from papal politics in European society. The Church in America, historians insist, forged an "American Catholicism," a national faith responsive to domestic concerns, disengaged from the disruptive ideological conflicts of the Old World. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from Italian state collections and newly opened Vatican archives, Peter D'Agostino paints a starkly different portrait. In his narrative, Catholicism in the United States emerges as a powerful outpost within an international church that struggled for three generations to vindicate the temporal claims of the papacy within European society. Even as they assimilated into American society, Catholics of all ethnicities participated in a vital, international culture of myths, rituals, and symbols that glorified papal Rome and demonized its liberal, Protestant, and Jewish opponents. From the 1848 attack on the Papal States that culminated in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy to the Lateran Treaties in 1929 between Fascist Italy and the Vatican that established Vatican City, American Catholics consistently rose up to support their Holy Father. At every turn American liberals, Protestants, and Jews resisted Catholics, whose support for the papacy revealed social boundaries that separated them from their American neighbors.

This book examines the relations between the Vatican and the Fascist regime in Italy during the period 1929-1932. The author sets out what he believes to be the long-term consequences of the 1931 crisis, and in so doing challenges a number of previously accepted interpretations.