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

In the early nineteenth century, the United States turned its idealistic gaze southward,
imagining a legacy of revolution and republicanism it hoped would dominate
the American hemisphere. From pulsing port cities to Midwestern farms
and southern plantations, an adolescent nation hailed Latin America’s independence
movements as glorious tropical reprises of 1776. Even as Latin Americans were gradually
ending slavery, U.S. observers remained energized by the belief that their founding
ideals were triumphing over European tyranny among their “sister republics.”
But as slavery became a violently divisive issue at home, goodwill toward
antislavery revolutionaries waned. By the nation’s fiftieth anniversary, republican efforts abroad
had become a scaffold upon which many in the United States erected an ideology of
white U.S. exceptionalism that would haunt the geopolitical landscape for generations.
Marshaling groundbreaking research in four languages, Caitlin Fitz defines this hugely
significant, previously unacknowledged turning point in U.S. history.