In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Tammy: I have this fantasy of doing some kind of like virtual reality thing or some kind of relationship map where yeah you can and as you’re saying like maybe it starts in second grade or maybe it starts young or it can even be something that people can do throughout their lives because there are people who continue to learn beyond you know what actually after they leave college. Believe it or not you know and but just travel from sort of one lesson or one person or one event to the other and be immersed in it because I agree. I feel like this artificial framing of history is this it’s done a little bit like it’s done to be facile. It’s done to be you know these chapters that we can easily finish and I remember not getting past World War II for most of high school because we would always run out of time. So we never got to be right and I was always like wait a minute what about the 60s you know?
Rosanne: …and of course, that was probably because when we were younger that was still too controversial to cover in school. So better that you finished with the Greatest Generation. We saved the world from Hitler. We’re all great and we don’t have to get to the murkier thing where we’re not sure what that was all about.
Tammy: Exactly. End of story. Let’s not even talk about Korea yeah just right yeah yeah just watch Smash and watch like shows from the 60s and that’ll be close enough.
Rosanne: Yeah right. Bewitched will tell you everything you need to know about the 60s.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
I’ve often said our mistake — and other people are talking about this too — I don’t think we should wait until later to teach you history and I don’t think we should keep doing the whole story in every year that you do it — like eighth grade and 10th grade or whatever. I think we should start in second grade at the beginning of the story and you don’t get to the end of it so you’re in 12th grade and then you don’t have to have women’s history and African American history and Asian American history and in in the east coast I’ve seen Italian American history which we don’t have in California which I wish — put them all in one story. Like all of them in the same and it just takes that much longer to tell it but we have 12 years. They’re in school for 12 years.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Rosanne: I have a friend who just wrote a biography of — I mean there’s a million of them but a new one is part of a group that I’m editing — and she discovered in letters which have only recently been let out — it’s always about what’s recently been let out. Like you were saying, the most recent stuff that the reason that FDR learned about the dangers of the Manhattan Project is because — his people weren’t letting the scientists talk to him but one of them was in a social club that Eleanor was in. So he got her to invite him to the White House. He told her what they were worried about and she told FDR — that she was the leeway for that.
Tammy: Exactly like the contact point…
Rosanne: ..and when she understood how important it was she knew he had to know. So it was all about her and just nobody thinks that. No one gives her that much credit. I mean we give her a lot of credit but there’s so many things we’re learning that women have done so much extra that got left behind.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Rosanne: …but I also think that’s the difference in their styles. I think that through her conversations, through her own curiosity, she was interested in what other people thought you know and I think Thoreau was always interested in what he thought. Which is fine. That’s what he did but you know I think there’s a difference there. Yeah. Which is why she could go to other countries and be able to report on them and understand. It’s like sociology — sociological work, too — not just journalism not…
Tammy: It’s not — ethnography and yeah and really studying people up close by you know taking them at like or maybe it’s beyond ethnography because it’s sort of it’s it’s relating to other humans as human rather than…
Rosanne: It’s feminist. that puts her in Eleanor Roosevelt category
Tammy: Exactly and another great woman who doesn’t get the full appreciation for what she’s — for the work that she does.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Tammy: Also her other book, Summer on the Lakes, which you know was written you know like 1844 where she’s just going to the Great Lakes and she’s essentially writing you know a version of Walden of her own and she’s talking with native Americans and all of this. It’s a travel memoir. It’s a, you know, it’s a journalistic you know um like it’s again dispatches from her journey…
Rosanne: …and we forget how important the Great Lakes were, right, before the country is humongous. This is how we travel all the goods and whatnot. I mean again from Ohio from Cleveland and just thinking about all the people I know who live in that area. It was so important that the Erie Canal — all these things that provided the transportation on water long before we have it any other way. It’s huge. I mean so to go to the Great Lakes. they were — they mean nothing now. Kids are like what’s the Great Lakes. I remember like they had to remember their names and all this stuff because times change but they were such a thing for her to memorialize if you will.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Tammy: What are the new things you know. I’m sure that Margaret felt the same way where people were like, you know, we women aren’t supposed to be this smart. Women aren’t supposed to be able to hold their own in conversation. What’s going on?
Rosanne: …and you know it’s so funny because can you imagine what she would have done in this world of the internet to disperse her ideas in all the many ways? Whether it’s on a website or a blog or whether she would have been you know part of a podcast as you said earlier. The ability to spread your ideas so far and wide would have been such a joy I think.
Tammy: Exactly and she’s one of the people who would also like — it’s not just her ideas that were radical but she was also — she was the first I think to interpret to translate Goethe to English right? So like — it’s not like she’s just coming at it from, you know, here I am this person who’s uneducated. She has the chops to help you know place everything and give everything context.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Tammy: So do you want to talk about some of the biographies and stuff that originated after she passed and how you know those versions of her might like the older versions the contemporary versions might not be so accurate?
Rosanne: I think that’s very true and of course, as you said earlier that’s true in so much of our history. Someone decided what we should share, what was acceptable, and you could — I think from Emerson’s point of view, I understand that he wanted people to love his friend. So he was he was filtering out what he thought would get in their way of understanding how great she was but then of course the next guy reads that book and only reports that much and that much. I mean it’s true also of the various iterations of the Diary of Anne Frank. Her father only lets certain things out because he didn’t want people to know that she sometimes wrote that she was mad at her mother because that was the woman he loved and he wanted you know and then later people have added those things in to say but here’s the real picture. It doesn’t mean she was a terrible little girl. It just means every teenager goes “my mom is making me crazy” It just gives her the more humanity to know all those dimensions and I think, yes, that’s what’s missing in these early biographies and we have to go back and really look at her writing — what exists — and then analyze that to get a sense of who she was but I think her activities tell us that. So teaching for Bronson Alcott tells us she was okay with an inter-racial group. She thought that you know desegregation was the proper thing to do. We wouldn’t do that. You could work for somebody else. You could tutor for anybody. You chose that job and you knew it was controversial and other people would judge you by it.
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
It makes perfect sense that she would have been testing the waters for all of it because she’s also married to a foreigner, right, and a Catholic and Catholics were not accepted in the country at that time either because of you know loving the Pope and all that stuff. So she probably was. I would say it’s probably that her son probably wasn’t necessarily — didn’t necessarily have darker skin because Giovanni comes from one more northern part of the country and we probably at that time we weren’t as discriminatory because Italy was kind of part of Europe and France and then you know Lafayette was a good guy and we’re sort of immigrants. Yeah. I don’t think it’s — it happens in the early 1900s because that’s when the great mass of unwashed poor folks show up and we want to put them to work in our crummy jobs and our seamstress factories and things like that and the guys are working on the railroad but yeah…
All the immigrants. And you know and the problem is or the luck the privilege is we assimilate so that we look white which of course is bullshit. There’s no such thing as white. It makes me crazy. Caucasian you know. I always tell students caucasian is the dumbest word in the world because there’s no land of “cauc.” It’s literally the dude right the dude who studied all the skulls to do the hierarchy of all the different ethnicities. He thought the prettiest skulls came from the people who lived in the Caucus mountains of Russia and so he qualified them as Caucasian but that’s not a thing, right?
In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.
The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!
Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!
Transcript:
Rosanne: Now, the other thing is we’re a weird country because I also did a book on this guy, Filippo Mazzei. He’s an Italian who comes to the United States in the 1700s and lives on the plantation next door to Thomas Jefferson and Mazzei didn’t use slaves. He brought Italian serfs — who were not treated great — but were not owned to work though. He wanted to grow wine in Virginia. He thought to bring the wine business to Virginia and he’s the guy — this is off topic — but he wrote “All men are created equal” in a pamphlet that he worked with Jefferson and he was invited to the Continental Congress but he couldn’t — he spoke — he wrote English and five other languages but he didn’t think he could keep up with the verbal debate fast enough, so he’s not in the movie 1776 because he didn’t go but when Jefferson wrote the Declaration he cribbed that phrase and I’m not making this up because the Congress in like the 80s or something did actually put that into the Congressional Record. That’s where that first phrase first appeared in America was from this Italian immigrant.
Tammy: I love it. I love it.
Rosanne: I know this is normal as anyone because he owned land and he was just one of the many people living here like the Scots but there wasn’t a flood of Italians. It’s in the early part of the 1900s when we get the flood of poor Italians. It’s the poor immigrants we never want. The rich guys we’re okay with.
![34 Conclusion rom Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-34.jpg)
![33 More on How To Change How We Teach History from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-33.jpg)
![32 Change How We Teach History from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-32.jpg)
![31 Eleanor Roosevelt from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-31.jpg)
![30 Fuller, Native Americans, and Sociology from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-30.jpg)
![29 Fuller and The Great Lakes from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-29.jpg)
![28 What Would Margaret Do Today? from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-28.jpg)
![27 The Fuller Biographies from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-27.jpg)
![26 An Italian In America? from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-26.jpg)
![25 Filippo Mazzei from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/rmw-concord-day-2021-fuller-rome-25.jpg)