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This section describes the philosophies of Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism. With regard to Rationalism, it focuses upon Chomsky's explicit support for this position and how he presents its implications for language, and spends a good deal of time on the nativism of Fodor and on his arguments for a ‘language of thought’. The section on Empiricism describes the work of the British Empiricist philosophers and the strengths and weaknesses of associative learning approaches within experimental psychology. The Pragmatism section describes the work of Peirce, W. James, and Rorty and Brandom, and touches upon the way Pragmatism as a philosophy might impact upon the study of language development.

The introduction looks at the broader efforts of many Americans, animated by nativism and xenophobia, to cast so called “new immigrants” from Asia and Europe as undesirable. At the end of the nineteenth century, immigration laws emerged as a tool of social engineering and nation building. At first, legislators passed immigration laws that focused heavily on qualitative restriction to determine who could enter the country. Later they moved on to quantitative restriction, imposing numbers on how many immigrants could arrive. The only issues on which restrictionist legislators and Italian and Jewish anti-restrictionists could find common ground when it came to immigration reform were family reunification and skill-based immigration, which opened up opportunities for some immigrants but heavily penalized others thus contributing to create the uneven and unfair immigration system still in existence today.

This chapter raises questions about the concept of ‘community’ and place attachment in the midst of neoliberal restructuring and ideas around the ‘big society’ by reflecting on the experiences of participants who feel threatened with displacement. It explores how a perception of forced displacement creates a feeling that community is being deliberately undermined by outside forces. Tenants who must re-join social housing waiting lists in order to downsize face the reality of the current crisis in social housing. At the local level, the re-allocation of homes is highly visible leading to resentment and tension about who belongs and who has the right to belong. When home and community are threatened nativism will manifest and claims to entitlements staked. This chapter follows chapter 5 in highlighting the ruptures in and between the working class over access to housing.

This chapter charts antecedents for Brexit in British history. Key to the discussion is a recurring nativist reaction to European engagements. A strategic bias towards the periphery resulted. In contrast, the United Kingdom’s occasional attempts to be a core continental power often foundered. Purist notions of insular sovereignty and ‘victory’ in two world wars hampered a precise appreciation of Britain’s independent leverage. These dilemmas intensified amidst integrationist currents in Europe after circa 1950, making previous approaches obsolete. Although a workable balance was constructed after the UK’s adhesion to the European Community in 1973, from the mid-1990s, an intra-Tory civil war tipped antithetical visions of British interests against each other, culminating in the 2016 referendum. The struggle over Brexit is profoundly cultural, raising issues beyond definitive resolution.

In this reflective autobiographical piece, the UK-based Gibraltarian novelist M.G. Sanchez describes a verbal assault he suffered in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and then goes on to remember other occasions in the past when his British-Gibraltarian identity was similarly impugned. Drawing on his experiences in the UK, Gibraltar and mainland Europe, he suggests that the Brexit mindset existed years and even decades before Brexit itself, its spirit of divisiveness and rebellion fanned all along by the populism of the right-wing press and the nativist prejudices of a large number of Britons. By way of conclusion, Sanchez states that what most surprised him about the Brexit referendum was not that the UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, but that almost half of the population voted to remain. His own experiences, he says, had convinced him that the Leave campaign was going to win by an even bigger margin.

This essay examines how two Irish-born intellectuals and high-ranking Union officers considered and helped shape several threads within the transformation of American nationalism that took place during the Civil War era. Both Thomas F. Meagher and Patrick R. Guiney interpreted Union military service as a way for Irish Americans to claim fuller inclusion in American society, and they defined a national loyalty that included Catholic and Irish American identities alongside other ones. Both men thus point to a broader concept of American nationalism that included full integration of Irish Americans into the American people alongside maintenance of an ethnic and religious identity. As a part of this impulse, Meagher and Guiney also promoted a more robust and better-defined concept of American national citizenship in law and practice, one that incorporated greater protection for naturalized citizens abroad and a stronger emphasis on human rights overall. This position supported a stronger unified nation-state and sense of U.S. nationalism. Moreover, both men underwent a political transformation to espouse the ideals of the Republican Party regardless of the criticism aimed at them by some of their fellow Irish Americans for doing so.

This chapter discusses how U.S. Catholic intellectuals split over the meaning and purpose of the American Civil War. It examines a variety of Catholic intellectuals from the clergy and laity and from the three main ethnic Catholic groups: the Irish, the Germans, and native-born Americans. Although some, such as Orestes Brownson, saw the war as a chance to prove Catholics’ patriotism and defeat nativism forever, other more conservative thinkers, such as James McMaster, opposed the war, emancipation, and what they perceived as the radical social agenda of Abraham Lincoln’s government. In the end, the alienating experience of the war helped accelerate the growth of a separate Catholic subculture in the United States.

This chapter outlines the ideology of black republicanism, a form of citizenship politics focused on three arguments: the principle of birthright citizenship inherited from England; nativism (the claim to be “native-born” unlike immigrant Europeans); and military service, as veterans in the Revolution and the War of 1812. It begins with an 1840 “Address” by Henry Highland Garnet asserting “We are Americans,” and cites Frederick Douglass making the same claim. It brings in the American Colonization Society, which sought to remove African Americans to Africa, denying their possible citizenship. Finally, it suggests that racialism itself was sharply contested in the early republic via the trope of “complexion,” a mutable characteristic, versus “race” or “color.”

Approaches the question of nativism—an investment in the rejuvenation of one’s nation and its putative mother tongues—through a practice that would seem to be at odds with it: translation. Unamuno used translation to reform the Spanish language, and through it, he became instrumental in launching the study of American literature in Spain in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He did so by discovering his “voice” in Spanish, he claimed, through his translations of everyone from Thomas Carlyle to Walt Whitman. This chapter thus deconstructs Unamuno’s nostalgic vision of the Spanish empire and its linguistic unity after 1898 through his own work as a translator of English, and then specifically US writing, set against his own theories of the future shared dominance of global writing by Spanish and English.

The introduction introduces early anti-foreign sentiment in Louisiana. The chapter notes how election frauds grew out of the early nativist sentiment in Louisiana during the 1830s and 1840s. The chapter discusses historians’ point of view about the Know Nothing feelings of anti-foreignism and anti-Catholicism and the effect that had on the state in the decade leading up to the Civil War. The chapter offers a new interpretation on why an anti-Catholic political party could exist in Louisiana and how Louisiana Know Nothings managed the growing sectional stress of the 1850s. The chapter concludes that Louisiana Know Nothings believed they could still stand for southern interests while preserving the Union.

This collection of essays shows that Transatlantic Studies allows for a wealth of topics and approaches—even as key methodological questions remain unresolved and the very legitimacy of Transatlantic Studies as such is still under dispute. This volume has sought to advance the discussion by putting the disputes surrounding the field front and center. The field need not reach consensus in order to thrive. Yet in order to be productive, every debate needs to start from an agreement about underlying principles. These would include the basic idea that it is valuable to study and teach the cultural archive in an academic context, or that a deep understanding of that archive can only be achieved through engagement with the languages in which that archive was written. These values have come under question, however, as an increasing number of colleges and universities have eliminated programs, courses, and faculty lines dedicated to serious work in the humanities. And if we cannot afford to disregard our institutional context, we also cannot ignore the changing tone of political discourse, as different forms of nativism and populist nationalism rear their heads across the world.

This chapter examines current scholarship on ethnicity in the northern states during the era of the American Civil War, and, through analysis of neglected primary source documents, offers thematic avenues of approach for future research. These themes include debates about the raw numbers of ethnic soldiers who wore blue, their battlefield performance, and their assimilation preferences during and after the war. Focusing on German and Irish immigrants and civilians, the author contends that far more Union soldiers were of ethnic background than previously considered, that the German-born soldiers of the Federal XI Corps fought as well as could be expected at Chancellorsville and elsewhere, that both the northern Irish and Germans encountered considerable nativism during the war that affected acculturation with the greater Anglo-American core culture, and that their experiences during the war did not quicken their assimilation into general American society, but rather retarded it, creating for many a culturally pluralistic view that simultaneously embraced Americanism while enshrining ethnic cultural traits.

The chapter explores how forms of nationalism have interacted with Brexit, focusing primarily on the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Brexit Party. The chapter outlines how the SNP opposed a hard Brexit and UKIP and the Brexit Party militantly agitated for such an outcome. Scottish nationalists believed a hard Brexit would inevitably revive support for independence but sought to avoid a hard Brexit by advocating that Scotland should retain close links or even membership of the EU and campaigned for a more cosmopolitan and egalitarian vision of the future through a form of civic nationalism. In contrast UKIP and the Brexit Party through forms of exclusionary nationalism advocated for a Britain free from the restraints of EU regulation and free to limit migration. A vision for the future that some would argue is nativist and monocultural. Key personalities in the discussion include Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage

The political crisis over the extension of slavery into the western territories and the subsequent Civil War affected municipal politics. German grocers disagreed with license laws that appeared oppressive and undemocratic. The dissenting behavior of German immigrants, especially their slave concubines and willingness to sell liquor to slaves and otherwise violate the slave code, stimulated the nativist tendencies of white South Carolinians. Many white Charlestonians supported the Know Nothing Party, although the Democratic Party continued to poll a majority in all but one local election. Although German and Irish immigrants tended to become naturalized citizens soon after their arrival in Charleston, citizenship did not necessarily mean political power, as property qualifications for voting restricted ballot access. Instead, white Charlestonians dominated municipal policy-making, and they enacted policies that aimed to control not only the slave and free black populations but also immigrants and especially grocers who violated the slave code. Some German and Irish immigrants assisted slaves in their bids to escape. When the Civil War began, many German and Irish immigrants volunteered for service in the Confederate military, while others remained in the city to maintain business operations, and some left the city altogether.

This chapter examines Tokiko’s connections with peers, mentors, and informants near and far. By tracing the contours of her social circles it identifies the space where her worldview and her subsequent plan for action took roots and blossomed. It also looks at the precise historical moment when circumstances coalesced into an invitation to act: the Year of the Horse Ansei 5 (1858).

In the years leading up to World War I, American liberal Protestants worked alongside their European and Japanese partners to expand the YMCA’s institutional reach in Japan. Despite its dramatic growth and influence on social reform, an emerging anti-Japanese movement led by white nativists in the United States threatened the YMCA’s efforts in Japan. Inspired by an emerging racial liberalism taking root among American social scientists, liberal Protestants responded with an alternative racial discourse that emphasized internationalism, cultural pluralism, and immigrant assimilation. Through their international partnerships and newly formed political lobbies, such as the Commission on Relations with Japan and National Committee for Constructive Immigration, American liberal Protestants lay a foundation for expanded social and political activism in the post-WWI era.

Chapter 3 analyzes African-American responses to the Mariel boatlift in the Miami Times, a local black newspaper. The boatlift immediately followed the McDuffie Riot, an African-American uprising against the latest incident of police brutality. As the local government turned their attention to the large Cuban influx, some African-Americans feared Miami’s white dominant infrastructure would continue to ignore their concerns. The chapter reveals that the Times endorsed the idea that blacks and white Anglo were the “real Americans” and that Cubans, constructed as white, were receiving preferential treatment over black Haitian migrants. The chapter argues that the seeming disdain for Cuban immigration was a symptom of a pressing desire to challenge white supremacy and promote greater equality for all blacks in U.S. culture. However, the larger presence of Afro-Cubans among the new Cuban refugees forced African-Americans to reexamine modes of solidarity that decide group membership according to a black/white racial frame.