Tyler Anbinder (born September 26, 1962) is an American historian known for his influential work on the pre-civil war period in U.S. history.
The Whig Party was a mid-19th century political party in the United States. Alongside the Democratic Party, it was one of two major parties between the late 1830s and the early 1850s and part of the Second Party System. As well as four Whig presidents, other prominent members included Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, William Seward, John J. Crittenden, and John Quincy Adams. The Whig base of support was amongst entrepreneurs, professionals, Protestants, and the urban middle class. It had much less backing from poor farmers and unskilled workers.
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 4, 1856. Democratic nominee James Buchanan defeated Republican nominee John C. Frémont and Know Nothing/Whig nominee Millard Fillmore. The main issue was the expansion of slavery as facilitated by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. Buchanan defeated President Franklin Pierce at the 1856 Democratic National Convention for the nomination. Pierce had become widely unpopular in the North because of his support for the pro-slavery faction in the ongoing civil war in territorial Kansas, and Buchanan, a former Secretary of State, had avoided the divisive debates over the Kansas–Nebraska Act by being in Europe as the Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Richard Wigginton Thompson was an American politician.
The Dead Rabbits were an Irish American criminal street gang active in Lower Manhattan in the 1830s to 1850s. The Dead Rabbits were so named after a dead rabbit was thrown into the center of the room during a gang meeting, prompting some members to treat this as an omen, withdraw, and form an independent gang. Their battle symbol was a dead rabbit on a pike. They often clashed with Nativist political groups who viewed Irish Catholics as a threatening and criminal subculture. The Dead Rabbits were given the nicknames of "Mulberry Boys" and the "Mulberry Street Boys" by the New York City Police Department because they were known to have operated along Mulberry Street in the Five Points.
Irish Catholics are an ethnoreligious group native to Ireland whose members are both Catholic and Irish. They have a large diaspora, which includes over 31 million American citizens, plus over 7 million Irish Australians, of whom around 67% adhere to Catholicism.
The Plug Uglies were an American Nativist criminal street gang, sometimes referred to loosely as a political club, that operated in the west side of Baltimore, Maryland, from 1854 to 1865. The term plug ugly was used to identify an extremely tough ferocious fighter who could give a sound beating to an opponent, with the Plug Uglies' name additionally stemming from their practice of stuffing oversized plug hats with wool and leather, pulling them down over their ears for head protection as primitive helmets during the numerous street battles they participated in. The name Plug Uglies was used to refer to a number of criminal gangs in New York City as well as Philadelphia.
The Roach Guards were an ethnically Irish criminal gang in the Five Points neighborhood of New York City in the early to mid-19th century. The gang was originally formed to protect New York liquor merchants in Five Points and soon began committing robbery and murder. The Roach Guards took their name from their founder and leader Ted Roach.
The history of New York City (1855–1897) started with the inauguration in 1855 of Fernando Wood as the first mayor from Tammany Hall, an institution that dominated the city throughout this period. Reforms led to the New York City Police Riot of June 1857. There was chaos during the American Civil War, with major rioting in the New York Draft Riots. The Gilded Age brought about prosperity for the city's upper classes amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class, as well as an increasing consolidation, both economic and municipal, of what would become the five boroughs in 1898.
The Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB) was an oath-bound secret society in New York City. It was created in 1849 by Charles B. Allen to protest the rise of Irish and German Catholic immigration into the United States.
Henry Joseph Gardner was the 23rd Governor of Massachusetts, serving from 1855 to 1858. Gardner, a Know Nothing, was elected governor as part of the sweeping victory of Know Nothing candidates in the Massachusetts elections of 1854.
The Know Nothings were an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s, officially known as the Native American Party before 1855, and afterwards simply the American Party. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.
Lewis "Lew" Baker was a Welsh-American patrolman in the New York Police Department who was simultaneously employed as a "slugger" for Tammany Hall. He was involved in voter intimidation and election fraud during the 1840s and 1850s. A close friend and associate of Irish mob boss John Morrissey, Baker frequently battled supporters of the nativist Know-Nothing movement for over a decade. He is most remembered however as the assassin of William "Bill the Butcher" Poole. Baker shot and killed Poole in a Broadway saloon during a brawl. Both Baker and Morrissey were placed on trial for murder, but were acquitted.
The Dead Rabbits riot was a two-day civil disturbance in New York City evolving from what was originally a small-scale street fight between members of the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys into a citywide gang war, which occurred July 4–5, 1857. Taking advantage of the disorganized state of the city's police force—brought about by the conflict between the Municipal and Metropolitan police—the fighting spiraled into widespread looting and damage of property by gangsters and other criminals from all parts of the city. It is estimated that between 800 and 1,000 gang members took part in the riots, along with several hundred others who used the disturbance to loot the Bowery area. It was the largest disturbance since the Astor Place Riot in 1849 and the biggest scene of gang violence until the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Order was restored by the New York State Militia, supported by detachments of city police, under Major-General Charles W. Sandford.
In the demography of the United States, some people self-identify their ancestral origin or descent as "American", rather than the more common officially recognized racial and ethnic groups that make up the bulk of the American people. The majority of these respondents are visibly white and do not identify with their ancestral European ethnic origins. The latter response is attributed to a multitude of generational distance from ancestral lineages, and these tend be Anglo-Americans of English, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Scottish or other British ancestries, as demographers have observed that those ancestries tend to be recently undercounted in U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey ancestry self-reporting estimates.
Daniel Ullman, also spelled Ullmann, was an American lawyer and politician from New York. He also served as a Union Army general in the American Civil War, raising and leading colored troops.
Baxter Street is a narrow thoroughfare that runs in a north–south direction in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It lies between Mulberry Street and Centre Street. It runs through Little Italy and the edge of Chinatown. Today, it runs one-way southbound from Grand Street to Hogan Place, and one-way northbound for its southernmost block from Worth Street to Hogan Place.
On or about 1849, Charles B. Allen founded the New York-based secret society Order of the Star Spangled Banner during the rise of the Know Nothing Party and the rise of nativism in the United States.
William E. Gienapp was an American historian noted for his writing on the period of the American Civil War. His prize-winning The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (1987) was based on original research and revised the traditional understanding of the political party's origins. Later he wrote Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography (2002). He co-authored a widely-used United States history textbook, Nation of Nations, and compiled one of the most widely-used documentary readers on the era of the Civil War, The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection (2001).
Xenophobia in the United States is the fear or hatred of any cultural group in the United States that is perceived as being foreign or strange or un-American. It expresses a conflict between an ingroup and an outgroup and may manifest in suspicion by the one of the other's activities, and beliefs and goals. It includes a desire to eliminate their presence, and fear of losing national, ethnic, or racial identity and is often closely linked to racism and discrimination.
The 1854 Massachusetts gubernatorial election was held on November 15. American Party candidate Henry J. Gardner was elected to his first term as governor, defeating incumbent Whig governor Emory Washburn.