Strangers In The Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

Nativism has been hard for historians to define. The word is distinctively American, a product of a specific chain of events in eastern American cities in the late 1830's and early 1840's. Yet it has a meaning so broad and indefinite that sometimes it seems to refer to a perennial human experience. Does nativism consist only of a particular complex of attitudes dominant in the anti-foreign crusade of the mid-nineteenth century? Or does it extend to every occasion when native inhabitants of a country turn their faces or raise their hands against strangers in their midst? What is nativism?