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Father Giovanni Antonio Grassi was the ninth president of Georgetown University and pioneered its transition to a modern university, earning him the moniker Georgetown's Second Founder. Originally published in Italian in 1818 and translated here into English for the first time, this book 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 Georgetown 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
News on the Present Condition of the Republic of the United States of North America, a lively, critical account of the young country from a European perspective. This popular volume introduced Italians to the great American experiment in self-governance and offered perspectives on the social reality for Catholics. A fascinating work for historians of Catholicism and of the Jesuits in particular, this book reveals the pivotal role Italian educators and priests played in the shaping of the new nation's greatest minds.
Georgetown's Second Founder includes a foreword by Georgetown historian Robert Emmett Curran illuminating Grassi's intellectual influence both within and beyond the institution he served.
This translation is from the 1822 revised and final Turin edition of Grassi's
Notizie sullo stato presente della repubblica degli Stati Uniti dell'America Settentrionale.
About the author
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).
Summary
Observations on the new American republic by an early president of Georgetown University
