This book is the result of an experiment in advanced teaching and learning which took place as a joint effort of the Departments of History at the European University Institute, Florence, and at New York University in the years 1996-1999. The experiment brought together fifteen graduate students and six professors from the two institutions, and included two workshops and a conference, in which also other scholars participated. Junior and senior scholars explored how and to what extent reciprocal exchanges between Europe and the USA in the period from the end of the XVIIIth century to the present were connected with and meaningful for their researches. The papers that have emerged from this approach also discuss the methodology of history: issues such as the relations between representations, identities, material production and consumption are challenged. The reciprocity of European representations of America and of American visions of Europe comes out clearly as does the impossibility of studying the symbolic considering the material and vice versa.