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The Americas of the 1850s provides James Dunkerley with compelling material for this majestic and unorthodox book. Drawing on a range of contemporary sources from Walt Whitman to Darwin,Trollope, Marx and Sarmiento, Dunkerley adopts a fully Atlanticist perspective to reappraise the first steps in American modernity. Americana is arranged around major themes of time and space, culture, political economy, and international relations. Between these more general discussions are transcripts of three court cases from the period which both divert and illuminate: John Mitchel's 1848 conviction for treason in Dublin led him through Bermuda, Tasmania and Nicaragua before he joined the Confederate cause in the US Civil War. Myra Gaines' suit for the return of her legacy in New Orleans reveals her Sligo-born father to have conspired against Jefferson and treated with Napoleon's agents in the sale of Louisiana. Mariano Munoz's trial for releasing a prisoner on Good Friday in the style of Pontius Pilate draws the curtain back on Francisco Burdett O'Connor, prefect of Tarija, elder brother of the Chartist leader Feargus, and Bolivar's chief of staff.Americana seeks simultaneously to savour the language and sensibilities of the nineteenth century in the Americas and to provide a pleasurable critique of contemporary vanities over globalisation and the complex sophistication of modernity. "The present text has chronology unashamedly as its starting-point, taking the years 1845 to 1855 as its framework...As should be clear, however, the framework adopted is not rigid or binding. If history is indeed lived forwards and read backwards, then events in the 1840s may form part of processes of the 1820s or of the 1860s as well as being 'now'. Each of the three trials presented here demonstrates the importance of such a reach, suggesting that the mid-century slot is simply an excuse for looking at the whole. This, though, is not my aim, and I hope to make something of the very ordinary proposition that these years were not only like all others in which humans live, love and die (and so leave some good stories), but can also be seen as distinctive in themselves and in relation to the conjuncture of today." - from the opening chapter
