Tyler Anbinder

Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century American politics and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His first book, Nativism and Slavery, analyzed the role of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing party on the political crisis that led to the Civil War. His most recent book, Five Points, traced the history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant slum, focusing in particular on tenement life, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic politics. Professor Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of The Gangs of New York. His current research includes an article on Irish immigrant savings habits and a book-length study of immigrant life in New York City from the first Dutch settlers to the present. (Complete C.V.)

Selected Publications

"Saving Grace: The Emigrant Savings Bank and Its Depositors." In Catholics in New York: Society, Culture, and Politics, 1808-1946, ed. Terry Golway, 83-92. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

"Isaiah Rynders and the Ironies of Popular Democracy in Antebellum New York." In Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, ed. Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen, 31-53. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

"Which Poor Man's Fight? Immigrants and the Federal Conscription of 1863." Civil War History 52 (December 2006): 344-372.

• Winner, John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article in Civil War History in 2006.

"Nativism and Prejudice Against Immigrants: An Historiographic Assessment." In A Companion to American Immigration, ed. Reed Ueda, 177-201. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

"From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne's Irish Tenants Encounter North America's Most Notorious Slum." The American Historical Review 107 (April 2002): 351-387.

Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001.

• Named a Notable Book by the New York Times (2001) and one of "Twenty-Five Books to Remember" by the New York Public Library (2001).

"Lord Palmerston and the Irish Famine Emigration." The (Cambridge) Historical Journal 44 (Summer 2001): 441-469.

"Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist." Civil War History 43 (June 1997): 119-140.

"'Boss' Tweed: Nativist," Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995): 109-116.

Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

• Winner, 1993, Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians for the most original book on the coming of the Civil War, the Civil War years, or the Era of Reconstruction.

Courses Taught

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1990.