Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
In early July I received an email message from a French magazine that provided new evidence to show how our current national government is blocking American access to the wider world.
I have subscribed to a weekly French news magazine call Le Nouvel Obs for more than two decades, but the magazine’s recent message explained that print copies could no longer be sent to the United States because “the customs taxes for press publications have abruptly changed.” The mailing methods for French magazines have been redefined as a distribution of “parcel packages,” which means that new tariff fees are now required for the import of French publications.
The revised “customs guidelines” create “specific constraints” and “new mailing expenses” that are forcing the Le Nouvel Obs to suspend print circulation within the United States (subscribers still have access to the magazine on a French website).
Although this stoppage of a foreign magazine’s print-edition distribution is a tiny side-story in current global affairs, it symbolizes the ways in which Trumpism’s tariffs and hostility for international collaborations are obstructing American engagement with foreign cultures by claiming that most transnational exchanges and institutions “are contrary to the interests of the United States.”
This fear of outsiders expresses common themes in extreme nationalist ideologies. Fearful views of “dangerous,” outsider ideas, for example, shaped the actions of southern enslavers who tried to block the influence of anti-slavery movements before 1860 and the actions of twentieth-century politicians who blocked American membership in the League of Nations and enacted radical anti-immigrant laws during the 1920s.
Contemporary campaigns against the influence of foreign people and ideas thus revive political fears from earlier times, but they also extend these fears into the twenty-first-century exchanges of international organizations, global commerce, transnational travel, and cross-cultural research at modern universities. The new Isolationism, in short, is using old fears to undermine the future influence and social-intellectual power of the United States.
The FedEx Global Education Center on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where six International Studies Centers were located before they were closed by the University this year.(Photo by Dan Sears/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Campaigns to Close American Society
The present Isolationism can be compared to America’s withdrawal from transnational alliances after the First World War, but current efforts to separate the United States from global institutions go far beyond the escapism of the 1920s because international entanglements have become vastly more important and complex since that time.
This intricate network of foreign connections, however, is precisely the modern global system that the Trump administration is trying to destroy through the relentless critiques of the NATO alliance, the executive decision to withdraw from more than 60 international organizations or partnerships (including the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the Paris Climate Agreement), and the closure of government programs that have long provided humanitarian services to low-income societies and war-torn nations around the world.
Meanwhile, the hostility for scapegoated “outsiders” within the United States is driving brutal ICE deportations of “undocumented” immigrants as well as new limitations on virtually all legal procedures for foreign immigration and for the protected asylum of refugees. Recent studies confirm that “Net Migration” into the United States has fallen to “close to zero or negative,” and reached the lowest level “in at least half a century.”
The new Isolationism is also shaping tariff policies that raise the costs of consumer goods or effectively block imports from longtime trading allies in Canada, Mexico, and the European Union (my French magazine is one obscure example). The arrival of foreign goods is now deemed to be as dangerous for Americans as the arrival of foreign people.
Foreign tourists are turning away from the United States as they react against new visa requirements, political suspicions, and other obstacles which contributed to a 5.5% decline in international tourism during 2025 and an $8 billion reduction in foreign tourism expenditures.
Declining international student enrollments at American universities may carry even more significant costs for the nation’s long-term influence. The Trump administration is replacing “duration of status” visas with four-year limits on foreign student visas, thereby complicating and impeding the future doctoral work of international students because it is almost impossible to complete a PhD or advanced medical training within four years.
Recent surveys indicate that roughly 65% of American colleges and universities are also projecting significant decreases in the enrollment of foreign undergraduates who are now struggling with new “visa barriers” and “travel restrictions” that push international student applications toward universities in other countries.
Finally, the anti-foreign ideology of the federal government has generated new proposals from the Office of Management and Budget (though temporarily stalled in the Senate) which would require politically appointed reviewers to decide if applications for federally funded international science projects fit into a “domestic-first framework” and serve “the national interest of the United States.”
Similar “revisions of process” are also proposed for the Education Department’s evaluation of grant applications that seek support for Title VI International Education Programs and the Fulbright-Hayes Fellowships for international exchanges and scholarly research. Expert “peer reviewers” have traditionally reviewed all project applications and recommended the best proposals to fund International Study Centers or Fellowship awards, but a new review system would replace outside peer evaluators with departmental insiders who can better “align such programs with current evolving priorities and needs.”
This new Isolationism is therefore bypassing carefully developed academic expertise and weakening American collaborations with other institutions across the world; and the Education Secretary’s most recent “Call to Action” explicitly asks university presidents how they will “protect academic programs from foreign influence.”
But the current suspicions of dangerous “outsider influences” also reiterate the fears of North Carolinians who responded to anti-slavery movements in the nineteenth century by restricting education, banning anti-slavery books, and preventing free Black people from entering the state.
The Suppression of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
In 1829 an African American clothing merchant named David Walker (1785-1830) published an angry anti-slavery Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker was then living in Boston, and his book was published in that city, but he was the son of an enslaved Black man and a free Black woman who had grown up as a free man in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Black sailors smuggled 200 copies of Walker’s book into Wilmington during the last weeks of 1829, bringing a forceful critique of white enslavers whom Walker condemned for violating both the Christian moral creed and the American political Declaration that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
As Walker’s arguments for the abolition of slavery began to spread into North Carolina’s Black communities, Governor John Owen and his political allies quickly decided that this dangerous, outside threat to the state’s social and economic order had to be stopped with new laws to block the migration of alien ideas and dangerous people.
Title page of the 1830 edition of David Walker’s Appeal…to the Colored Citizens of the World….
The General Assembly therefore enacted legislation that forbade all instruction in reading or writing for enslaved Black people, prohibited Black sailors from disembarking in North Carolina’s ports, banned free Black North Carolinians from boarding ships that docked anywhere in the state, and mandated imprisonments for persons who distributed abolitionist texts (up to one year in jail for a first violation of the law)—with the additional threat of a death penalty “without benefit of clergy” for a second offense.
Anyone who gave books to an enslaved person could be fined up to $200. Some counties also added local statues that prevented Black speakers from preaching in religious services, and a new Constitutional amendment in 1835 eliminated voting rights for free Black citizens throughout the state.
The hostility for an “alien” Abolitionist writer thus led North Carolina’s political leaders to destroy the freedom to publish or distribute specific books, to speak publicly about political issues, to preach religious beliefs, and to move freely within the state. The fear of dreaded “foreign ideas” became more powerful than the democratic protection of personal freedom or human rights.
Fearing Foreign People, Ideas, and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in a Democratic Society
The nineteenth-century struggles to abolish slavery were more essential for the historical advance of freedom and democracy than the current struggles to overturn new tariffs or new restrictions on foreign student visas or new constraints on transnational science and scholarship.
There are nevertheless ideological similarities that connect today’s “domestic-first” walls against the “contagion” of foreign people, imported goods, and even foreign magazines with past efforts to ban anti-slavery writings and the free movement of Black people.
The restrictive policies in pre-Civil War North Carolina and in the twentieth-century system of racist segregation laws clearly abolished basic human rights, yet white political leaders supported such policies and later legislation like the 1960s ban against Marxist speakers at public universities as rational, rights-denying actions to defend “national interests.” Fearful, “freedom-loving” white North Carolinians wanted a less free political and cultural system that incarnated their anti-outsider anxieties.
Critics of Trumpism both within and outside the United States rightly stress that the Trump Administration’s anti-foreign scapegoating and Isolationism often resemble the fearful or xenophobic policies of modern authoritarian states.
The repressive actions to block the import of David Walker’s Appeal to Colored People in North Carolina, however, suggest that Trumpism’s fear of outsiders and foreign influences replicates some of the most pervasive fears among white elites in the pre-Civil War South. These fears have never disappeared, but they have (also) never finally stopped the expansion of human rights or the transnational migration of people, commerce, ideas, and cross-cultural knowledge.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. His most recent book is titled “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
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