Nativism is a distinctively American term coined in 1830s-40s cities

Evidence

Nativism has been hard for historians to define. The word 1s distinctively American, a product of a specific chain of events in eastern American cities in the late 1830’s and early 1840’s. Yet it has a penumbra of meaning so broad and indefinite that sometimes it seems to refer to a perennial human experience. Does nativism consist only of the particular complex of attitudes dominant in the anti-foreign crusade of the mid-nineteenth century? Or does it extend to every occasion when native inhabitants of a country turn their faces or raise their hands against strangers in their midst? … From the Garden of Eden to 1984, no age or society seems wholly free from unfavorable opinions on outsiders. Understood in such general terms, nativism would include every type and level of antipathy toward aliens, their institutions, and their ideas. Its beginnings in American history would date from the first Indian resistance to white intruders. This view, by reducing nativisrn to little more than a general ethnocentric habit of mind, blurs its historical significance. On the other hand, confining nativism to the special sort of movement prominent for a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century is too narrow; the inner spirit of that movement has taken quite different guises at other times and places. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 22

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the term’s origin and the definitional tension between a perennial ethnocentrism and a movement-specific anti-foreign crusade.
• XREF: Defining an ‘enemy’ category as historicized and morphable directly feeds the reader’s question of whether racialization is a fixed endpoint or transitional form.