MC Library Research Guides: German American Heritage : Read

Books on German American Heritage

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity

More Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. Arguably, German Americans form America's largest ethnic group. Yet they have a remarkably low profile today, reflecting a dramatic, twentieth-century retreat from German-American identity. In this age of multiculturalism, why have German Americans gone into ethnic eclipse--and where have they ended up? Becoming Old Stock represents the first in-depth exploration of that question. The book describes how German Philadelphians reinvented themselves in the early twentieth century, especially after World War I brought a nationwide anti-German backlash. Using quantitative methods, oral history, and a cultural analysis of written sources, the book explores how, by the 1920s, many middle-class and Lutheran residents had redefined themselves in "old-stock" terms--as "American" in opposition to southeastern European "new immigrants.

Contented Among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Woman and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

German-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States, yet their very success at assimilating has also made them one of the least visible. Contented among Strangers examines the central role German-speaking women in rural areas of the Midwest played in preserving their ethnic and cultural identity. Even while living far from their original homelands, these women applied traditional European patterns of rural family life and values to their new homes in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. As a result they were more content with their modest lives than were their Anglo-American counterparts. Through personal recollections--including interesting diary material translated by the author, church and community documents, and migration and census data--Pickle reveals the diversity and richness of the women's experiences.

Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home

German Americans were one of the largest immigrant groups in the Civil War era, and they comprised nearly 10 percent of all Union troops. Yet little attention has been paid to their daily lives?both on the battlefield and on the home front?during the war. This collection of letters, written by German immigrants to friends and family back home, provides a new angle to our understanding of the Civil War experience and challenges some long-held assumptions about the immigrant experience at this time. Originally published in Germany in 2002, this collection contains more than three hundred letters.

Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775

In 1700, some 250,000 white and black inhabitants populated the thirteen American colonies, with the vast majority of whites either born in England or descended from English immigrants. By 1776, the non-Native American population had increased tenfold, and non-English Europeans and Africans dominated new immigration. Of all the European immigrant groups, the Germans may have been the largest.Aaron Spencer Fogleman has written the first comprehensive history of this eighteenth-century German settlement of North America. Utilizing a vast body of published and archival sources, many of them never before made accessible outside of Germany, Fogleman emphasizes the importance of German immigration to colonial America, the European context of the Germans' emigration, and the importance of networks to their success in America.

Fries's Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution

In 1798, the federal government levied its first direct tax on American citizens, one that seemed to favor land speculators over farmers. In eastern Pennsylvania, the tax assessors were largely Quakers and Moravians who had abstained from Revolutionary participation and were recruited by the administration of John Adams to levy taxes against their patriot German Reformed and Lutheran neighbors.Led by local Revolutionary hero John Fries, the farmers drew on the rituals of crowd action and stopped the assessment. Following the Shays and Whiskey rebellions, Fries's Rebellion was the last in a trilogy of popular uprisings against federal authority in the early republic.

We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists After 1848

Widely remembered as a time of heated debate over the westward expansion of slavery, the 1850s in the United States was also a period of mass immigration. As the sectional conflict escalated, discontented Europeans came in record numbers, further dividing the young republic over issues of race, nationality, and citizenship. The arrival of German-speaking "Forty-Eighters," refugees of the failed European revolutions of 1848-49, fueled apprehensions about the nation's future. Reaching America did not end the foreign revolutionaries' pursuit of freedom; it merely transplanted it. In We Are the Revolutionists, Mischa Honeck offers a fresh appraisal of these exiled democrats by probing their relationship to another group of beleaguered agitators: America's abolitionists.

German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie

This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government–assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community soon after World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the recent Nazi war effort, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA’s space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, and by the rocketeers’ families, co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney’s book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country’s own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.

The Emigrants

Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the 1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austria, and America. The narrator literally follows their footsteps, studding each story with photographs and creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album. But gradually, Sebald's prose, which combines documentary description with almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts a new magic, and the four stories merge into one. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs.

The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans

It is a spring morning in New Orleans, 1843. In the Spanish Quarter, on a street lined with flophouses and gambling dens, Madame Carl recognizes the face of a German girl who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. But the olive-skinned woman is a slave, with no memory of a white past. And yet her resemblance to her mother is striking, and she bears two telltale birthmarks. Had a defenseless European orphan been illegally enslaved, or was she an imposter? So begins one of the most celebrated and sensational trials of nineteenth-century America. In brilliant novelistic detail, award-winning historian John Bailey uses Miller's dramatic trial to describe the fascinating laws and customs surrounding slavery, immigration, and racial mixing. Did Miller, as her relatives sought to prove, arrive from Germany under perilous circumstances as an indentured servant or was she, as her master claimed, a slave for life? The trial pits a humble community of German immigrants against a hardened capitalist and one of the most flamboyant lawyers of his time. Bailey follows the case's incredible twists and turns all the way to the Supreme Court and comes to a shocking conclusion in this investigative history that reads like a suspense novel.

The Germans

From the earliest days of American colonization, starting with the Jamestown settlement, German immigrants have been part of the fabric of the United States. This anthology chronicles the waves of German immigration, their experiences, and their intellectual, industrial, and cultural impact on their new homeland. An entire chapter is dedicated to notable German immigrants, including entrepreneur Levi Strauss, physicist Albert Einstein, and supermodel Heidi Klum.

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

"Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York's immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round." -- Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World 97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits--shopping, cooking, and eating--of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. With 40 recipes included, 97 Orchard is perfect for fans of Rachel Ray's Hometown Eats; anyone interested in the history of how immigrant food became American food; and "foodies" of every stripe.

The Writings of Ferdinand Lindheimer: Texas Botanist, Texas Philosopher

Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer is known as the “father of Texas botany.” While he was not the first botanist to collect plants for scientific examination in Texas, his collections are credited with helping botanists around the world to understand the nature, extent, and significance of the diversity of plants in the state. In partnership with Asa Gray of Harvard University, Lindheimer spent eight years collecting Texas plants to distribute to a list of paying subscribers—including places like the British Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the Smithsonian Institution. Today, no fewer than 362 plant names are based, at least in part, on Lindheimer collections, and 65 plants have been named in his honor.

German Art in New York: The Canonization of Modern rt, 1904-1957

Why did the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, and art collectors and curators such as Katherine Dreier and Alfred Barr, collect modern German art in the first half of the twentieth century? And why did certain works of art belong to the canon while others did not? In this book, Gregor Langfeld argues that National Socialism played a crucial role in the canonization of movements such as Expressionism and the Bauhaus. A role which undermined the post-1945 reputations of many artists associated with classical and figurative trends. Langfeld offers important new insights into the political and ideological motivations behind the New York art world's fluctuations in opinion, fashion, and price.

Gingerbread for Liberty!: How a German Baker Helped Win the American Revolution

Christopher Ludwick was a German-born American patriot with a big heart and a talent for baking. When cries of "Revolution!" began, Christopher was determined to help General George Washington and his hungry troops. Not with muskets or cannons, but with gingerbread! Cheerfully told by Mara Rockliff and brought to life by Vincent Kirsch's inventive cut-paper illustrations, Gingerbread for Liberty is the story of an unsung hero of the Revolutionary War who changed the course of history one loaf at a time.

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German American Heritage : Read