Although the United States has always portrayed itself as a sanctuary for the world's victim's of poverty and oppression, anti-immigrant movements have enjoyed remarkable success throughout American history. None attained greater prominence than the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a fraternal order referred to most commonly as the Know Nothing party. Vowing to reduce the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, the Know Nothings burst onto the American political scene in 1854, and by the end of the following year they had elected eight governors, more than one hundred congressmen, and thousands of other local officials including the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago. After their initial successes, the Know Nothings attempted to increase their appeal by converting their network of lodges into a conventional political organization, which they christened the "American Party." Recently, historians have pointed to the Know Nothings' success as evidence that ethnic and religious issues mattered more to nineteenth-century voters than better-known national issues such as slavery. In this important book, however, Anbinder argues that the Know Nothings' phenomenal success was inextricably linked to the firm stance their northern members took against the extension of slavery. Most Know Nothings, he asserts, saw slavery and Catholicism as interconnected evils that should be fought in tandem. Although the Know Nothings certainly were bigots, their party provided an early outlet for the anti-slavery sentiment that eventually led to the Civil War. Anbinder's study presents the first comprehensive history of America's most successful anti-immigrant movement, as well as a major reinterpretation of the political crisis that led to the Civil War.
City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of New York’s immigrants, both famous and forgotten: the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, ...
Paul Cuffee was a wealthy, free man from Massachusetts. A devout Quaker of Ghanaian origin, Cuffee left Philadelphia in 1810 on an expedition to presentday Sierra Leone to investigate the possibility of black resettlement in the country ...
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 3,0, University of Kassel, language: English, abstract: In this paper, I will analyze Lyman Beecher’s A Plea for the West with regard ...
... 2013); Kristen L. Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: Germans Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016); and Susanne Martha Schick, “'For God, Mac, ...
College Station : Texas A & M University Press , 1982 . ... Horace Mann's Letters on the Extension of Slavery into California and New Mexico ; and on the Duty of Congress to Provide the Trial by Jury for Alleged Fugitive Slaves .
A soldier from another command explained the regiment's attitude to the English journalist William H. Russell, telling him that "the boy who commands that pretty lot recruited them for the Seceshes in New York, but finding he could not ...
In American Slavery, Irish Freedom, Angela F. Murphy examines the interactions among abolitionists, Irish nationalists, and American citizens as the issues of slavery and abolition complicated the first transatlantic movement for Irish ...
This book examines the party's platform from the perspective of their own political climate, the complex events at the time, and the impact the Know Nothings had.
This book explores the multiple dimensions of the antebellum Kansas tempest as a microcosm of the larger history of sectional conflict and reconciliation.
Table of Contents for this issue: volume 1, number 4: december 2011 Articles rachel a. shelden Messmates' Union: Friendship, Politics, and Living Arrangements in the Capital City, 1845–1861 bruce levine "The Vital Element of the ...