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Present and future generations of scholars must consider Salvemini one of the major historians of Fascism and anti Fascism.
The second important author, John P. Diggins, published Mussolini and Fascism, The View from America (1972). This comprehensive analysis of American views of Italy covers America’s fascination with Mussolini’s ideas, Fascist propaganda in America, and American and Italian American resistance to Mussolini and Fascism. Present and future scholars of Fascism and anti Fascism in America will continue to rely on this fundamental and important work.
Third, Alexander DeConde published Half Bitter, Half Sweet, An Excursion Into Italian American History (1971). Based on extensive research of primary sources, the work is considered a comprehensive and scholarly study of the diplomatic and political history of Italian American relations from 1700 to 1970. This comprehensive analysis provides students and scholars with a fine selective bibliography on the subject.
Since 1970 a constellation of new publications on Fascism and anti Fascism has appeared in the United States and in Italy, spurred by interest in ethnicity and ethnic studies, and literature on the subject continues to flourish.
In general, historians and researchers agree that the definitive history of Fascism and anti Fascism in the United States has yet to come. In Blackshirts in Little Italy, Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921–1929, published in 1999, Philip V. Cannistraro recognizes exactly that: the history of Fascism and anti Fascism in the United States, “despite some recent advances is still to be written.”
Perhaps the present or next generation of scholars will address this challenge.
Neither Salvemini nor Diggins wrote, and perhaps never intended to write, a definitive history of Fascism and anti Fascism in the United States. Their works fall within the category of documentary and critical historical analysis and represent the vademecum for those who plan to write such a definitive history of Fascism and anti Fascism in the United States.