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Know-Nothing movement

Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Know-Nothing movement, in U.S. history. The increasing rate of immigration in the 1840s encouraged nativism. In Eastern cities where Roman Catholic immigrants especially had concentrated and were welcomed by the Democrats, local nativistic societies were formed to combat "foreign" influences and to uphold the "American" view. The American Republican party, formed (1843) in New York, spread into neighboring states as the Native American party, which became a national party at its Philadelphia convention in 1845. The movement was temporarily eclipsed by the Mexican War and the debates over slavery. When the slavery issue was temporarily quieted by the Compromise of 1850 nativism again came to the fore. Many secret orders grew up, of which the Order of United Americans and the Order of the Star-spangled Banner came to be the most important. These organizations baffled political managers of the older parties, since efforts to learn something of the leaders or designs of the movement were futile; all their inquiries of supposed members were met with a statement to the effect that they knew nothing. Hence members were called Know-Nothings, although there was never a political organization bearing the name. Efforts were concentrated on electing only native-born Americans to office and on agitating for a 25-year residence qualification for citizenship. Growing rapidly, the Know-Nothings allied themselves with the group of Whigs who followed Millard Fillmore and almost captured New York state in the 1854 election, while they did sweep the polls in Massachusetts and Delaware and had local successes in other states. The disintegration of the Whig party aided them in their strides toward national influence. In 1854 they looked toward extension into the South, and in the following year they openly assumed the name American party and cast aside much of their characteristic secrecy. In June, 1855, a crisis developed; at a meeting of the national council in Philadelphia, Southerners seized control and adopted a resolution calling for the maintenance of slavery. The slavery issue, after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, again came to the front, and this time the slavery issue split apart the Know-Nothing movement as it had the Whigs. The antislavery men went into the newly organized Republican party. Millard Fillmore, the American party candidate for President in 1856, polled a small vote and won only the state of Maryland. The national strength of the Know-Nothing movement thus was broken.

See R. A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 (1938, repr. 1964); W. D. Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South (1950, repr. 1968); C. Beals, Brass-Knuckle Crusade (1960).

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Nothing

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Nothing is commonly understood as the lack or absence of anything at all. Colloquially, the term is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimpressive thing, event, or object.

Language and logic

Grammatically, the word "nothing" is a noun, which suggests that it refers to something. This can lead to confusion and forms the basis for a number of jokes. The simplest meaning is: no thing. So if "Nothing" is said to be in a particular place, have a particular quality, then it is meant that "no thing" is there, or has this or that quality. The word "naught" also has this same meaning. Its basic uses can often be restated to avoid this appearance: "There is nothing in the basement" can be restated as "There is not one thing in the basement" or "Everything is not in the basement" (which can imply that there is any quantity short of 'everything' in the basement.) "Nothing is missing" can be restated as "everything is present". Conversely, many fallacious conclusions follow from treating "nothing" as a noun. In this case, "nothing" would not be a correct statement, scientifically speaking, as air can be referred to as "something."

Modern logic made it possible to articulate these points coherently as intended, and many philosophers hold that the word "nothing" does not function as a noun: there is not any object it refers to. There are still various opposing views, though: that, for example, our understanding of the world rests essentially on noticing absences and lacks as well as presences, and that "nothing" and related words serve to indicate these.

Philosophy

The concept of 'nothing' has been studied throughout history by philosophers and theologians; many have found that careful consideration of the notion can easily lead to the logical fallacy of reification. (If one does not believe that nothing is no thing.) However, many of the existentialist and postmodern philosophers and writers would argue that Nothing is actually the lack or absence of something, rather than of anything.

The understanding of 'nothing' varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, Shunyata (emptiness), unlike "nothingness", is considered a state of mind in some forms of Buddhism (see Nirvana, mu, and Bodhi. See also soku hi in Kyoto school). Achieving 'nothing' as a state of mind in this tradition allows someone to be totally 'focused' (in the Western sense of the word) on a thought or activity at a level of intensity they would not be able to achieve if they were 'consciously' thinking. The classic example of this is an archer drawing a bow, attempting to erase their mind as a way to better focus on the shot. Existentialism and Martin Heidegger have brought these two understandings closer together.

Science

In mathematics, nothing does not have a technical meaning. It could be said that a set contains "nothing" if and only if it is the empty set, in which case its cardinality (or size) is zero. In other words, the word "nothing" is an informal term for an empty set. However, since two minus two is also called nothing, it could also refer to the number zero.

In physics, the word nothing is not used in any technical sense. A region of space is called a vacuum if it does not contain any matter. But it can contain physical fields. In fact, it is practically impossible to construct a region of space which contains no matter or fields, since gravity cannot be blocked and all objects at a non-zero temperature radiate electromagnetically. However, supposing such a region existed, it would still not be "nothing", since it has properties and a measurable existence as part of the quantum-mechanical vacuum.

In computing, "Nothing" (VB.Net), or "null" (Java, C#, others), can be a keyword used to represent an unassigned variable, or a pointer that does not point to any particular memory address, or a reference that does not refer to an extant object. Similarly, Null is used in SQL as a symbolic representation of the absence of data. This meta-data usage of "null" is different from the unprintable ASCII and unicode null character, which has a numerical value of zero — although it is different from the ASCII character for zero ("0"). The ASCII blank character (" ") is not the same as an empty string (""), which is itself sometimes confused with the null pointer in languages such as C. Most forms of assembly language have a no-operation (nop) instruction (often with a numerical value of zero) — that is, a command to do nothing, which can prove useful for blanking out areas of problem code.

Nothing means a void of matter in an area.

See also

Further reading

References

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