America for the Americans - The Know Nothing Party

Know Nothing

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.

About the Presenter:

Seth Cotlar is a Professor of History at Willamette University in Salem, OR where he teaches a range of courses on many different periods in US History.  He is currently working on an article entitled “Rightlandia: Walter Huss and the Long History of the Far Right in Oregon, 1955-2005” about an anti-communist crusader with ties to white nationalists and neo-Nazis who was elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party in 1978. Portions of that research have appeared on his Ghost newsletter page, also entitled "Rightlandia." Cotlar’s first book, Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2011) won the James Broussard Prize for Best First Book from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.  He is also the co-editor, with Richard Ellis, of a collection of essays entitled Historian in Chief: How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future, (University of Virginia Press, 2019).

Questions? Contact lizg@deschuteslibrary.org