Learn more about the antebellum era and the long history of nativist politics in the US.
Anti-immigrant sentiment has played a role in US politics from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 up to the present. Only once, however, has the mass expulsion of immigrants been the primary policy goal of a major political party, and that was the short-lived Know Nothing Party of the late 1840s and first half of the 1850s. This talk will discuss the political, religious, and economic dynamics that produced the Know Nothing party of the antebellum era, with an eye to how those historical dynamics have familiar echoes in our contemporary moment.