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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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.