Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the history of nativism in our country’s history. Along with racism, it is ingrained in our history.

Scholarly work (although that shouldn't turn off the casual reader). The history of mistrust and blame thrust upon immigrant from many nations and during many periods of our history is very illuminating, and so relevant to today. Very worthwhile.

Very interesting and helpful historical work.

Unreadable. I bought this as a textbook for a college class, and it was so difficult to read. It's basically page after page of fact after fact. There is no story, no narrative at all. It's also very easy to forget the information after reading it. My whole class read this book, and everyone had the same problem retaining the information that was presented. The day after we finished reading the book, one classmate commented, "Oh, I completely forgot that book existed." We had literally just finished reading it. There has to be a better book out there on this subject.I am an avid reader, and I have gotten through many a dry textbook. This book took it to a whole new level.

Every paragraph was something to read and remember.

Solid history, tons of great insights...This book is really worth reading re: nativism, ethnic history, insights into how different groups relate or do not relate.

on time, on target, as promised

... none that has been identified at least, but "nativism" does have some of the marks of what Richard Dawkins has called a "meme" - derived from the word 'memory' - a kind of evolutionary package of cultural 'knowledge'. Like genetic packages, cultural patterns are inherited and thus inherent, and like genes, 'memes' can be efficiently re-adapted to other functions than their originals."Strangers in the Land" is a classic study of American Nativism from the Civil War to the 1920s. By no coincidence, the same era was the heyday of Jim Crow, of lynchings and ethnic cleansing directed against African-Americans. The hatred directed against Catholics by nativist movements merged eventually into the hatred of "blacks" in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the acme of Nativism. But this same era was also the heyday of American anti-Semitism, culminating in the exclusion acts passed by Congress against Eastern European Jews as well as Sicilian Catholics. That anti-Semitism - like it or not, Americans - played an enabling part of Hitler's unchallenged ascent to power and in the Holocaust, when America kept the door closed to Jewish escapees. And let's not forget that nativism and anti-immigrant bigotry lay at the core of the exclusion acts against Chinese and Japanese, who might have sought freedom and opportunity in "Beikoku" - "Beautiful Country", the name used in Japan then for America.In other words, as author Higham demonstrates, bigotry/nativism is a "pattern" - his use of that word seems to me to approach the idea of a meme - that can serve the cause of hatred and exclusion of any ethnic/racial/religious minority. And it's almost always evident that bigotry expressed toward one minority merely temporarily masks bigotry felt towards all "others." Today's nativist fear and loathing of "wetbacks" and "islamicists" contains all the memetic material needed for tomorrow's recrudescent anti-Semitism and societal persecution of.... ___________. [Put your own ethnicity in the blank.]

Superb: explains roiling political life of usa up to 1921 immigration act.