Know-Nothings

The modern GOP isn't the first party to embrace huge conspiracies. But the lessons should be sobering.

From xenophobia to conspiracy theories, the Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today.

Donald Trump combines the instincts of a reality-TV star with the politics of a hundred-and-seventy-year-old nativist movement.

The “great replacement theory” is nothing new.

From Germans and Irish to blacks and Jews, new Americans often have been told to “go home.”

We are a nation of immigrants and refugees. Yet we always fear who is coming next.

160 years ago, a similarly fractured GOP took months to settle on a speaker.

In the late 19th century, statesmen feared that Catholics were something less than civilized (and less than white).

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.

Moral panics repeat, again and again.

The battle is worth winning for Kevin McCarthy — and could reshape the Republican Party.

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

The debate regarding which Bible kids should read in school was about whether Catholic immigrants should have the full rights of American citizenship.

To understand the right’s plans for Babbitt, look to George Shiffler.

In the course of research about the Red Summer of 1919, a historian in Maine uncovers a disturbing event that took place on her own campus.

The first Jewish member of Congress was a virulent nativist and anti-immigration troll who ended his life in an insane asylum.

The violence on Capitol Hill that foreshadowed a bloody war.

Rebels in the post-Civil War South perfected the art of excluding voters, but it was yankees in the North who developed the script.