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This 1856 political cartoon depicts the responses of the three candidates to the results of the election. Winning Democrat James Buchanan sits reading the returns of the election while newspaper editors approach from the left. Behind them the defeated Republican candidate John C. Fremont rides off into the West. To the right the second defeated candidate, Millard Fillmore, laments his fall into the “caverns of Know-Nothingism.”

Here’s What Happens to a Conspiracy-Driven Party

The modern GOP isn't the first party to embrace huge conspiracies. But the lessons should be sobering.
by Zachary Karabell via Politico Magazine on January 30, 2021

How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Shaped American Politics

From xenophobia to conspiracy theories, the Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today.
by Lorraine Boissoneault via Smithsonian on January 26, 2017

Donald Trump Isn’t a Fascist; He’s a Media-Savvy Know-Nothing

Donald Trump combines the instincts of a reality-TV star with the politics of a hundred-and-seventy-year-old nativist movement.
by John Cassidy via The New Yorker on December 28, 2015
A Public Health Services physician checking a woman immigrating into the United States for illness.

How the Irish Became Everything

Two new books explore the messy complexities of immigration—from the era of Lincoln to Irish New York.
by Tom Deignan via Commonweal on November 1, 2024
JD Vance, along with characters from the Scorsese movie "Gangs of New York," shown over a background of a map of New York City

JD Vance is Just Another Know Nothing Nativist

MAGA has been a largely white movement of non-urban people who seem to think that people unlike them are scary and that there is only safety in homogeneity.
by Rebecca Solnit via Literary Hub on August 23, 2024
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Tucker Carlson’s Cries About Immigrants Have a Disturbing 19th-Century Parallel

The “great replacement theory” is nothing new.
by Zachary M. Schrag via Made By History on May 17, 2021

Behind Trump’s ‘Go Back’ Demand: A Long History of Rejecting ‘Different’ Americans

From Germans and Irish to blacks and Jews, new Americans often have been told to “go home.”
by Marc Fisher via Washington Post on July 15, 2019

When People Flee to America’s Shores

We are a nation of immigrants and refugees. Yet we always fear who is coming next.
by Jamelle Bouie via Slate on November 17, 2015
U.S. Capitol building.

The Messiest Speakership Battle in History

160 years ago, a similarly fractured GOP took months to settle on a speaker.
by Joshua Zeitz via Politico Magazine on September 30, 2015
Political cartoon depicting children recoiling from Catholic bishops crawling onto the beach with their robes and hats making them look like crocodiles.

When America Hated Catholics

In the late 19th century, statesmen feared that Catholics were something less than civilized (and less than white).
by Joshua Zeitz via Politico Magazine on September 23, 2015
Political cartoon depicting 1856 presidential candidates

The First Punch

There are uncanny parallels between the elections of 2024 and 1856, with one big exception: in 1856, it was the political left that was on the offensive.
by Matthew Karp via Harper’s on December 5, 2024

How America’s Rich Legacy of Fear and Hatred Fuels the Conspiracy Theories of Today

Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing.
by Arthur Goldwag via Talking Points Memo on June 21, 2024
Abraham Lincoln campaigning with the Wide Awakes.

The Club of Cape-Wearing Activists Who Helped Elect Lincoln—and Spark the Civil War

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.
by Jon Grinspan via Smithsonian on April 1, 2024
Illustration, The Burning of the Convent in 1834.

The Banality of Conspiracy Theories

Moral panics repeat, again and again.
by Colin Dickey via The Atlantic on July 1, 2023
Kevin McCarthy
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What 1856 Teaches Us About the Ramifications of the House Speaker Fight

The battle is worth winning for Kevin McCarthy — and could reshape the Republican Party.
by Corey M. Brooks via Made By History on January 5, 2023

When the House Needed Two Months and 133 Votes to Elect a Speaker

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.
by Ronald G. Shafer via Retropolis on December 30, 2022
Black and white photo of Charles Sumner

“A Solemn Battle Between Good and Evil.” Charles Sumner’s Radical, Compelling Message of Abolition

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.
by Timothy Shenk via Literary Hub on October 24, 2022
A bronze statue of Civil War soldiers on horseback, in front of the U.S. Capitol building.

How Twitter Explains the Civil War (and Vice Versa)

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.
by Ariel Ron via The Strong Paw Of Reason on January 6, 2022
Lithograph of an armed mob attacking another group in the street.

The Philadelphia Bible Riots

The debate regarding which Bible kids should read in school was about whether Catholic immigrants should have the full rights of American citizenship.
by John Bicknell via Law & Liberty on October 13, 2021
Oil cloth cape, worn to protect a firefighter’s upper body from embers and water. Likely from the Shiffler Fire Hose Company No. 32, of Philadelphia, founded in 1846.

There Was an Ashli Babbitt in the 19th Century. His Story Is a Warning.

To understand the right’s plans for Babbitt, look to George Shiffler.
by Zachary M. Schrag via Slate on September 1, 2021
Two people being tarred and feathered

The Hidden Story of When Two Black College Students Were Tarred and Feathered

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.
by Karen Sieber via The Conversation on February 8, 2021

Lewis Levin Wasn't Cool

The first Jewish member of Congress was a virulent nativist and anti-immigration troll who ended his life in an insane asylum.
by Zachary M. Schrag via Tablet on October 22, 2018

Raising Cane

The violence on Capitol Hill that foreshadowed a bloody war.
by Joanne B. Freeman via Lapham’s Quarterly on September 15, 2018

Today’s Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History

Rebels in the post-Civil War South perfected the art of excluding voters, but it was yankees in the North who developed the script.
by Gregory P. Downs via Talking Points Memo on July 26, 2018

Story of Paris Hill Man Connects Maine to ‘Complexities’ of Slave Trade

Torn from his family in Africa, Pedro Tovookan Parris spent the last years of his short life in rural Maine.
by Kelley Bouchard via Press Herald on July 15, 2018

Today’s Eerie Echoes of the Civil War

We may not be in the midst of a war today, but the progress of democracy in this country is still tied to the rights of its most vulnerable citizens.
by Manisha Sinha via New York Review of Books on March 6, 2018
Millard Filmore.
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Remembering the Sins of Millard Fillmore

A little-remembered president's most notorious act.
by Carole Emberton via Made By History on January 5, 2018

The Bitter History of Law and Order in America

It has stifled suffrage, blamed immigrants for chaos, and suppressed civil rights. It's also how Donald Trump views the entire world.
by Andrea Pitzer via Longreads on April 6, 2017
A political cartoon showing two figures leading donkeys in opposite directions. The donkeys are depicted with the faces of Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay.

Prospects for Partisan Realignment: Lessons from the Demise of the Whigs

What America’s last major party crack-up in the 1850s tells us about the 2010s.
by Philip Wallach via Brookings on March 6, 2017

Trump's Anti-Immigration Playbook Was Written 100 Years Ago. In Boston.

How a trio of Harvard-educated blue bloods led a crusade to keep the "undesirables" out and make America great again.
by Neil Swidey via Boston Globe on February 9, 2017
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