Reporting the revolution: Margaret fuller, herman melville, and the Italian risorgimento

Abstract

Margaret Fuller’s journalism took a radical new shape when she traveled to Europe to report on the Italian revolution in the late 1840s as foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune. As America’s first woman journalist to report on a major international revolution, Fuller established herself as the primary source of information on the Italian Revolution, a role that grew out of her bold social reform writing for the Tribune that exposed institutional and government corruption. Her compassion for the populist Italian uprising known as the Risorgimento would significantly overlap with that of Herman Melville. Both writers viewed the plight of the Risorgimento as a representation of social progress instructive for an American audience. Unlike their contemporaries, Fuller and Melville did not use the Italian revolution as an opportunity to glorify America’s own revolutionary struggle for a republic, but instead measured it against the shortcomings of their nation’s democratic ideals.