Observations on the new American republic by an early president of Georgetown University

Father Giovanni Antonio Grassi was the ninth president of Georgetown University and pioneered its transition into a modern institution, earning him the moniker Georgetown’s Second Founder. Originally published in Italian in 1818 and translated here into English for the first time, his News on the Present Condition of the Republic of the United States of North America records his rich observations of life in the young republic and the Catholic experience within it.

When Grassi assumed his post as president in 1812, he found the university, known then as Georgetown College, to be in a “miserable state.” He immediately set out to enlarge and improve the institution, increasing the number of non-Catholics in the school, adding to the library’s holdings, and winning authority from Congress to confer degrees. Upon his return to Italy, Grassi published his News, which introduced Italians to the promise and contradictions of the American experiment in self-governance and offered perspectives on the social reality for Catholics in America.

This book is a fascinating work for historians of Catholicism and of the Jesuits in particular.

Father Giovanni Antonio Grassi was born in Schilpario, in the region of Lombardy, Italy, in 1775. He studied in the seminary of Bergamo and joined the Jesuits as a novice in 1799. In 1810 he traveled to the United States, where he met John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore. Grassi served as president of Georgetown University from 1812 to 1817. He returned to Italy in 1817, where he died in Rome in 1849.

Roberto Severino is a professor emeritus of Italian at Georgetown University.

Robert Emmett Curran is a professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University and is the author of the three-volume series A History of Georgetown University (Georgetown University Press, 2010).

Italian map of the United States, ca. 1812–15 frontispiece

Foreword

Introduction: Father Giovanni Grassi, SJ, “Second Founder” of Georgetown University

Acknowledgments

Notizie

1. News on the Present Condition of the Republic of the United States of Northern America

2. On the Various Sects That Exist in the United States

3. On the Present Condition of the Catholic Religion in the United States

A Contemporary Unicum: The North American Review Piece of 1823

Bibliography

Table of All the Most Remarkable Things to Be Found within the Geography of the United States in North America

Index