- Registration is required for this event.
- Registration will open on September 10, 2025 @ 7:00pm.
- A library card is not required.
Program Description
Event Details
Discover information on historical people, places, or things.
Who counts as an American? This question plagued nineteenth-century politics as German and Irish immigrants arrived in unprecedented numbers.
On an election day in 1854, St. Louis witnessed one of the nation’s largest anti-immigrant riots. Rioters sabotaged an election and murdered at least ten people.
Historian Luke Ritter explains how American-immigrant tensions in Missouri manifested deeply felt anxieties about American identity and democracy amid rapid demographic change. He identifies patterns of behavior that have persisted across time and analyzes U.S. immigration policies, both past and present.
About the presenter:
Dr. Luke Ritter is an Assistant Professor at St. Louis Community College - Forest Park.
He is the author of "Mothers Against the Bomb: The Baby Tooth Survey and the Nuclear Test Ban Movement in St. Louis, 1954-1969," which appeared in the Missouri Historical Review in 2018. He is featured in a forthcoming documentary about nuclear fallout in the U.S., titled Silent Fallout (2025).
He is the editor of American Conspiracism: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Routledge 2024). He is the author of Inventing America's First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (Fordham 2021) and over fourteen peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
Disclaimer(s)
Accommodations
If you need accommodations for this program, please contact the Library as soon as you are able.