Know Nothings and the Politics of Paranoia

How anti-immigrant misinformation fueled a misguided movement

Maria Monk challenged her doubters to prove her wrong. She offered to take them to the scene of the crime:

Permit me to go through the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, at Montreal, with some impartial ladies and gentlemen, that they may compare my account with the interior parts of that building, into which no persons but the Roman Bishop and the priests... are ever …