Many European nation-states coalesced around ethnic identity and shared cultural heritage. The Spanish nation-state coalesced around both of these, but also around the religion of Catholicism. Protestantism was almost non-existent in Spain and those who adhered to either Islam or Judaism were either banished or forcefully converted to Catholicism during the formation of the Spanish nation-state.

Before World War I, the Prussian influence was greatly felt in Germany, and Prussia was still regarded as a powerful political and military force. The United States supported the unification of Germany, which strengthened Otto von Bismarck's power and came about after the Franco-Prussian war.

Garibaldi was one of the most famous revolutionaries of the mid-nineteenth century. His revolutionary career began in South America as an agitator and soldier in favor of various republican causes. He returned to Europe in the midst of the revolutions of 1848. He raised an army of volunteers to fight the Austrian Empire in order to free Northern Italy so that the entire Italian peninsula could be unified. Garibaldi was one of the central figures of the Italian Risorgimento, which resulted in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

The battles of Tours and Lepanto were not fought by English forces, so we can rule these two answer choices out immediately. The battles of the Somme and Trafalgar were fought during World War One and the Napoleonic Wars, respectively, and so came too late to be part of the rise of English nationalism. The Battle of Agincourt, which took place during the Hundred Years’ War with the French, happened in the fifteenth century and so came at the perfect time to be incorporated into the rise of nationalism in England. It helped solidify what it meant to be English, as opposed to French, and led to the rise of self-identifying nationalist ethnicity among the English people.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian military commander who lived from 1807 until 1882 and who fought in a variety of conflicts meant to bring about the unification of Italy. He was a trusted general and advisor of Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of Italy, and is credited with helping him achieve a mostly unified Italy. Garibaldi was widely respected for his renowned military mind and was fairly popular. During the fight to unify Italy, he had to rely mainly on volunteers who became known as “Redshirts” because they lacked the money to buy uniforms and instead they wore red. These volunteers helped not only by fighting, but also by showing that this movement had popular support among the people.

The Act of Union of 1801 dissolved the Irish Parliament and formally ended any semblance of Irish independence. The territory of Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom, now called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Act of Union may be understood as a British government reaction to the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and also a response to the French Revolution a decade earlier, both of which inflamed Irish nationalism.

The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was one of the most influential and economically prosperous by the time the movement towards Italian unification began in the mid-nineteenth century. Led by Victor Emmanuel and Camillo di Cavour, the Kingdom was the primary driving force behind Italian unification. In 1861, the Kingdom of Sardinia annexed all the other territories that comprise modern-day Italy into the Kingdom of Italy.

Realpolitik was the primary political philosophy of the German unifying leader Otto von Bismarck. Realpolitik is based around a pragmatic application of political power, or political power wielded outside of ideological, religious, or ethnic motivation.

Garibaldi made headway in unifying the peninsula through military means, but allowed Cavour to complete the work he'd begun. Guglielmo Pepe was an Italian general who passed away before unification. Mussolini ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, long after Italian unification. Dante was an Italian poet of the late Middle Ages.

The term “irredentism” is used to describe the belief that a territory within another country’s borders should actually be part of a nation that exists either outside of or independent of those borders. Generally, in European history, it refers to a territory that was once part of a nation, such as France with Alsace-Lorraine or Germany with Austria, that has been lost in conflict and which the losing nation desires to reclaim. It is one of the more dangerous and prominent forms of European nationalism because it so often leads to war in European history.