Like many institutions of high education throughout the United States, the University of North Texas requires all students to pass introductory United States History courses. While the purpose of these courses should be to create a population well versed in U.S. history and sociopolitical and economic context, the foundational textbooks utilized in these courses promote American exceptionalism and U.S. supremacy. Their omission of the complex and controversial history of the United States creates a false master narrative based on an idealized version of U.S. history. Even textbooks that include diversity continue to uphold a progressive master narrative that ignores issues of systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia. My theoretical analysis of the required textbooks, Exploring American Histories: A Survey with Sources, is applicable to all introductory U.S. history textbooks. Decolonialism, critical race, and intersectional feminism are theoretical lenses that disentangle and highlight otherwise invisible aspects of American exceptionalism and the serious consequences of the subjugation of subaltern historical narratives. This thesis applies theory with examples of how textbooks or supplemental teaching can expose foundational oppression, violence, and discrimination to teach students critical thinking and help them see connections between the past and their present.

The Risorgimento or "resurrection" of Italy united a collection of independent Italian kingdoms, duchies, and principalities under the auspices of the Piedmontese House of Savoy. No longer was Italy a mere expression géographique, as Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich snidely remarked in 1847, but a united nation state. Studies of the Risorgimento successfully highlight the role of famous Piedmontese and Italian nationalists in demonstrating the success of the movement. However, the smaller states of the peninsula have largely disappeared from these histories. Among these overlooked states is the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Tuscany's last grand duke, Leopold II of Habsburg-Lorraine. Both are consistently omitted from broader surveys of the peninsula. In rare situations when Leopold II enters the historical narrative he is dismissed as a reactionary, although he maintained a reputation as an enlightened and relatively liberal ruler for the majority of his rule. Especially in anglophone literature, little to no discussion of his thirty-five-year reign is available. This omission creates an unfortunate lacuna in the historiography of the Risorgimento. It is in studies of these smaller Italian states that the intricacies of statecraft, nationalism, and localism are most visible. To understand the extent of the Risorgimento's success, it …