Germans in the Civil War

Germans in the Civil War PDF Author: Walter D. Kamphoefner
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
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 written by seventy-eight German immigrants--men and women, soldiers and civilians, from the North and South. Their missives tell of battles and boredom, privation and profiteering, motives for enlistment and desertion and for avoiding involvement altogether. Although written by people with a variety of backgrounds, these letters describe the conflict from a distinctly German standpoint, the editors argue, casting doubt on the claim that the Civil War was the great melting pot that eradicated ethnic antagonisms.

Germans in the Civil War

Germans in the Civil War PDF Author: Walter D. Kamphoefner
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 written by seventy-eight German immigrants--men and women, soldiers and civilians, from the North and South. Their missives tell of battles and boredom, privation and profiteering, motives for enlistment and desertion and for avoiding involvement altogether. Although written by people with a variety of backgrounds, these letters describe the conflict from a distinctly German standpoint, the editors argue, casting doubt on the claim that the Civil War was the great melting pot that eradicated ethnic antagonisms.

German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era

German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era PDF Author: Alison Clark Efford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107031931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This study reframes Civil War-era history, arguing that the Franco-Prussian War contributed to a dramatic pivot in Northern commitment to African-American rights.

The Germans in the American Civil War

The Germans in the American Civil War PDF Author: Wilhelm Kaufmann
Publisher: John Kallmann Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
This singular account of an estimated 216,000 Germans, mostly newly-arrived immigrants and about 300,000 Americans of German descent, who served in the American Civil War is an unprecedented event in the publication of material on U.S. military history. Written by a successful German immigrant, publishing entrepreneur and journalist, Wilhelm Kaufmann, 1847-1920, this book was originally published in 1911 by Munich Publisher R. Oldenbourg in the German Language only. In their Civil War Centennial book, Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography, published in 1967, the distinguished contributors, Allen Nevins, James I. Robertson, Jr., and Bell I. Wiley, wrote of Kaufmann's history: Finally, after two world wars and the consequent anti-German sentiment and the neglect that discouraged publication, a new Edition -- in English for the first time -- is now available. Scholars, general readers, genealogists and people who wish to explore their own German heritage will welcome this penetrating account -- now with enhanced features: readable type, larger maps (36 in all) designed for clarity; and now, most importantly, fully indexed for more effective reference use. Available in both a quality genuine clothbound as well as an economical paperback edition, this history deserves a place on your permanent library shelf. 392pp., 36 maps, bibliography, end notes, index.

Damn Dutch

Damn Dutch PDF Author: David L. Valuska
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 9780811700740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Highlights the Pennsylvania Dutch regiments and post-1820 immigrant Germans at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Chancellorsville and the Germans

Chancellorsville and the Germans PDF Author: Christian B. Keller
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823226522
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Often called Lee's greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed by "Stonewall" Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the "flight" of German immigrant troops. The impact on America's large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers' letters, memoirs, and regimental records, Christian Keller reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German-American perspective, military and civilian. He offers a fascinating window into a misunderstood past, one where the German soldiers' valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. He critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments and documents the impact of nativism on Anglo-American and German-American reactions--and on German self-perceptions as patriots and Americans. For German-Americans, the ghost of Chancellorsville lingered long, and Keller traces its effects not only on ethnic identity, but also on the dynamics of inclusion andassimilation in American life.

Learning from the Germans

Learning from the Germans PDF Author: Susan Neiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715521
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.

German Americans on the Middle Border

German Americans on the Middle Border PDF Author: Zachary Stuart Garrison
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809337568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Before the Civil War, Northern, Southern, and Western political cultures crashed together on the middle border, where the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers meet. German Americans who settled in the region took an antislavery stance, asserting a liberal nationalist philosophy rooted in their revolutionary experience in Europe that emphasized individual rights and freedoms. By contextualizing German Americans in their European past and exploring their ideological formation in failed nationalist revolutions, Zachary Stuart Garrison adds nuance and complexity to their story. Liberal German immigrants, having escaped the European aristocracy who undermined their revolution and the formation of a free nation, viewed slaveholders as a specter of European feudalism. During the antebellum years, many liberal German Americans feared slavery would inhibit westward progress, and so they embraced the Free Soil and Free Labor movements and the new Republican Party. Most joined the Union ranks during the Civil War. After the war, in a region largely opposed to black citizenship and Radical Republican rule, German Americans were seen as dangerous outsiders. Facing a conservative resurgence, liberal German Republicans employed the same line of reasoning they had once used to justify emancipation: A united nation required the end of both federal occupation in the South and special protections for African Americans. Having played a role in securing the Union, Germans largely abandoned the freedmen and freedwomen. They adopted reconciliation in order to secure their place in the reunified nation. Garrison’s unique transnational perspective to the sectional crisis, the Civil War, and the postwar era complicates our understanding of German Americans on the middle border.

Germans of Louisiana

Germans of Louisiana PDF Author: Merrill, Ellen C.
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 1455604844
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
During the antebellum period, New Orleans was the largest German colony below the Mason-Dixon line. Later settlements moved upriver between New Orleans and Donaldsonville, near Lecompte, and in North Louisiana near Minden. Germans of Louisiana is the first unified published study of the influence the German people made on the state of Louisiana and its inhabitants. Beginning with the French and Spanish colonial periods and working through the post-Civil War period, this book covers the heritage those German settlers left behind.

On the Road to Total War

On the Road to Total War PDF Author: Stig Förster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521521192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
On the Road to Total War attempts to trace the roots and development of total industrialised warfare, a concept which terrorises citizens and soldiers alike. Mass mobilisation of people and resources and the growth of nationalism led to this totalisation of war in nineteenth-century industrialised nations. In this collection of essays, international scholars focus on the social, political, economic, and cultural impact of the American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification.

August Willich's Gallant Dutchmen

August Willich's Gallant Dutchmen PDF Author: Joseph R. Reinhart
Publisher: Kent State University
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Civil War letters from soldiers serving in a German regiment Organized by Colonel August Willich, a former Prussian army officer who led troops during the German Revolution of 1848, Indiana's German 32nd Indiana regiment fought in the Western Theater of the Civil War. The 32nd Indiana forged an enviable combat record on the battlefields at Rowlett's Station in Kentucky; at Shiloh, Stones River, and Missionary Ridge in Tennessee; and at Chickamauga and Pickett's Mill in Georgia. The letters collected here originally appeared in German in wartime issues of German American newspapers. These rare documents connect the contemporary reader to the world of the patriotic immigrant soldier and his hard-fighting regiment, revealing personal motivations, wartime experiences, opinions, ethnic pride, and bravery, as this regiment engaged in some of the most bitter fighting in the West. These gripping letters also provide insight into the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the war and reveal the competing ethnic identities, nativism, and immigrant acculturation of late-nineteenth-century America. The Germans of the 32nd Indiana proved themselves to be "Gallant Dutchmen" in the fight to save the Union. Gallant Dutchmen is a valuable addition to Civil War studies and will also be welcomed by those interested in ethnic and immigration studies.