Nativism - Bibliography
Archdeacon, Thomas J. Becoming American: An Ethnic History. New York, 1983. A good place to start on the history of American immigration.
Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. Rev. ed. New York, 1995. Provides a fine scholarly overview and interpretation of nativism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington, Ind., 1985. Another good reference for the history of immigration.
Daniels, Roger. Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890–1924. Chicago, 1997. Integrates American reactions to the new immigration with policies toward African Americans, Native Americans, and other minorities. Daniels stands alone as the historian of Japanese-American relocation and redress.
Daniels, Roger, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano, eds. Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress. Rev. ed. Seattle, 1991. A superior overview.
Davis, David Brion, ed. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ithaca, N.Y., 1970. Features a discourse and rhetoric of nativist countersubversion, including a sensitive reading of the author's construct of the paranoid style.
DeConde, Alexander. Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History. Boston, 1992. Focuses on the rise, place, and slow decline in power of the Anglo-American majority and argues that historians often minimize the importance of British immigrants and their role in fomenting nativism against other groups. A good starting place for those wishing to further assess nativism's place in the context of foreign relations; it also has the advantage of assessing the development of racism as an integral part of the American establishment.
Doenecke, Justus D. Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941. Lanham, Md., 2000. Presents a thoughtful assessment of nativist themes in American noninterventionism before World War II.
Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York, 1986. Portrays racism on both sides of the Pacific.
Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York, 1995. Dumenil offers measured assessments of the wrenching cultural change of that era and regressive American reactions. Her treatment of the Klan is particularly insightful.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New York, 1963. One of those few books that just gets better with time.
——. Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America. Rev. ed. Baltimore, 1984. Offers second thoughts equally significant.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York, 1965. Classic and problematic statement of liberal distaste for McCarthyism and the political right.
Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. New York, 1995. An empathic qualification of critiques of the populist skein in American history.
Knobel, Dale T. America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York, 1996. Skillfully links nineteenth-and twentieth-century nativist themes.
Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. New York, 1994. The Red Scare receives significant analysis in this work.
Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace." New York, 1994. Explores in a pathbreaking manner the virulent association in the popular mind between epidemics and immigrants.
Levin, Murray B. Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression. New York, 1971.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920. Minneapolis, 1955. Still pertinent reading.
Perea, Juan F., ed. Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States. New York, 1997. Contains essays suggestive of recent themes in nativism and its postmodern meanings.
Ribuffo, Leo P. The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia, 1983. Presents perhaps the most skillful synthesis of nativist theory, historiography, domestic culture and foreign relations.
Smith, Geoffrey S. To Save a Nation: American Extremism, The New Deal, and the Coming of World War II. Rev. ed. Chicago, 1992. Links the activities of the nativist mass leaders of the 1930s to political and diplomatic developments before Pearl Harbor.