WordNet
n. an ignorant person [syn: ignoramus, uneducated person]
Wikipedia
The Native American Party, renamed the American Party in 1855 and commonly known as the Know Nothing movement, was an American political party that operated nationally in the mid-1850s.
The movement arose in response to an influx of migrants and promised to "purify" American politics by limiting or ending the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, whom they saw as hostile to republican values and as being controlled by the Pope. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, the movement strove to curb immigration and naturalization but met with little success. Membership was limited to Protestant men. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class membership was divided over the issue of slavery.
Its most prominent leaders were U.S. Representative Nathaniel P. Banks and former U.S. Representative Lewis C. Levin. The American Party nominated former President Millard Fillmore in the 1856 presidential election.
Usage examples of "know nothing".
Of Boccaccio's early years we know nothing more than that his first preceptor was the Florentine grammarian, Giovanni da Strada, father of the poet Zanobi da Strada, and that, when he was about ten years old, he was bound apprentice to a merchant, with whom he spent the next six years at Paris, whence he returned to Florence with an inveterate repugnance to commerce.
Not only did Umbrage know nothing of the princess, aside from her name, but everyone I asked about her greeted me with shakes of the head, shrugs of the shoulder, and unvarnished ignorance of the subject at hand.
But when one is translating from a language used by a civilization of which we know nothing, located as far away as the centre of the Galaxy, one has to approximate.
We might have been struck by some disturbance in the ether (I know nothing of space.
I know nothing of the truth of this, but I am reasonably certain that they paid him very handsomely.
She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty.
They know nothing of the powerful forces moving in the background.