The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation

George Mason University historian Schrag (The Great Society Subway) takes a comprehensive look at the 1844 riots that pitted nativist Protestants in Philadelphia against Irish Catholic immigrants. Positioning the riots as a precursor to the Civil War, Schrag details how leaders of the American Republican Party (a forerunner of the Know Nothing Party), including charismatic newspaperman and future U.S. congressman Lewis Levin, fanned the flames of anti-immigrant resentment by alleging that Irish Catholics were a “menace to American self-government.” Allegations spread that Catholics were trying to remove the Protestant bible from public schools, and a nativist rally in the Irish neighborhood of Kensington erupted into a brawl, sparking waves of violence that led to the burning of two Catholic churches and the ransacking of a third, the deaths of dozens of protestors, and a military takeover of the city. Schrag renders the era’s political and religious turmoils in granular detail and offers blow-by-blow accounts of the rolling street battles that engulfed Philadelphia. History buffs will be rewarded by this meticulous account of a largely forgotten episode. (June)