Becoming Old Stock

Becoming Old Stock PDF Author: Russell Kazal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122367X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
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." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners. Becoming Old Stock sheds light on the way German Americans used race, American nationalism, and mass culture to fashion new identities in place of ethnic ones. It is also an important contribution to the growing literature on racial identity among European Americans. In tracing the fate of one of America's largest ethnic groups, Becoming Old Stock challenges historians to rethink the phenomenon of ethnic assimilation and to explore its complex relationship to American pluralism.

Becoming Old Stock

Becoming Old Stock PDF Author: Russell Kazal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122367X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
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." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners. Becoming Old Stock sheds light on the way German Americans used race, American nationalism, and mass culture to fashion new identities in place of ethnic ones. It is also an important contribution to the growing literature on racial identity among European Americans. In tracing the fate of one of America's largest ethnic groups, Becoming Old Stock challenges historians to rethink the phenomenon of ethnic assimilation and to explore its complex relationship to American pluralism.

Suburb in the City

Suburb in the City PDF Author: David R. Contosta
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814205801
Category : Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia, Pa.)
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
"In Suburb in the City, David Contosta tells the story of how Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, once a small milling and farming town, evolved to become both a suburban enclave for wealthy Philadelphians and a part of the city itself." "In 1854, the railroad connected Philadelphia and Chestnut Hill and the village was annexed by the city. Attuned to the romantic currents of the age, the wealthy men and women who moved to Chestnut Hill believed that the village's semi-rural surroundings might uplift them physically, spiritually, emotionally, and morally. At the same time, they wanted to continue to enjoy the best that the city had to offer while escaping from its more unpleasant aspects: dirt, crime, disease, and other shortcomings. They thus cultivated a dual identity with both suburb and city." "Ironically, this led to a sense of division as prosperous suburbanites held themselves aloof from the resident shopkeepers and domestic servants who provided so many of their creature comforts. Being a suburb in the city also meant that Chestnut Hill could not control its political destiny, as communities outside the municipal limits could. In response, residents developed a number of civic organizations that became a sort of quasi government." "Contosta's study of Chestnut Hill thus illuminates the divided and often ambivalent feelings that Americans hold about their great cities. He includes anecdotes gleaned from dozens of interviews with men and women of many backgrounds - lawyers, nuns, debutantes, grocers, craftsmen, and former servants - who tell of their lives in Chestnut Hill. More than one hundred photographs, many never before published, further enliven this analysis of suburban America."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History

Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History PDF Author: James Ciment
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317474163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 3151

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Book Description
No era in American history has been more fascinating to Americans, or more critical to the ultimate destiny of the United States, than the colonial era. Between the time that the first European settlers established a colony at Jamestown in 1607 through the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the outlines of America's distinctive political culture, economic system, social life, and cultural patterns had begun to emerge. Designed to complement the high school American history curriculum as well as undergraduate survey courses, "Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History" captures it all: the people, institutions, ideas, and events of the first three hundred years of American history. While it focuses on the thirteen British colonies stretching along the Atlantic, Colonial America sets this history in its larger contexts. Entries also cover Canada, the American Southwest and Mexico, and the Caribbean and Atlantic world directly impacting the history of the thirteen colonies. This encyclopedia explores the complete early history of what would become the United States, including portraits of Native American life in the immediate pre-contact period, early Spanish exploration, and the first settlements by Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists. This monumental five-volume set brings America's colonial heritage vibrantly to life for today's readers. It includes: thematic essays on major issues and topics; detailed A-Z entries on hundreds of people, institutions, events, and ideas; thematic and regional chronologies; hundreds of illustrations; primary documents; and a glossary and multiple indexes.

Inside the Great House

Inside the Great House PDF Author: Daniel Blake Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718010
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Inside the Great House explores the nature of family life and kinship in planter households of the Chesapeake during the eighteenth century—a pivotal era in the history of the American family. Drawing on a wide assortment of personal documents—among them wills, inventories, diaries, family letters, memoirs, and autobiographies—as well as on the insights of such disciplines as psychology, demography, and anthropology, Daniel Blake Smith examines family values and behavior in a plantation society. Focusing on the emotional texture of the household, he probes deeply into personal values and relationships within the family and the surrounding circle of kin. Childrearing practices, male-female relationships, attitudes toward courtship and marriage, father-son ties, the character and influence of kinship, familial responses to illness and death, and the importance of inheritance—all receive extended treatment. A striking pattern of change emerges from this mosaic of life in the colonial South. What had once been a patriarchal, authoritarian, and emotionally restrained family environment altered profoundly during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The personal documents cited by Smith clearly point to the development after 1750 of a more intimate, child-centered family life characterized by close emotional bonds and by growing autonomy—especially for sons—in matters of marriage and career choice. Well-to-do planter families inculcated in their children a strong measure of selfconfidence and independence, as well as an abiding affection for their family society. Smith shows that Americans in the North as well as in the South were developing an altered view of the family and the world beyond it—a perspective which emphasized a warm and autonomous existence. This fascinating study will convince its readers that the history of the American family is intimately connected with the dramatic changes in the lives of these planter families of the eighteenth-century Chesapeake.

America Becomes Urban

America Becomes Urban PDF Author: Eric H. Monkkonen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520413881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
America's cities: celebrated by poets, courted by politicians, castigated by social reformers. In their numbers and complexity they challenge comprehension. Why is urban America the way it is? Eric Monkkonen offers a fresh approach to the myths and the history of US urban development, giving us an unexpected and welcome sense of our urban origins. His historically anchored vision of our cities places topics of finance, housing, social mobility, transportation, crime, planning, and growth into a perspective which explains the present in terms of the past and ofers a point from which to plan for the future. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988 with a paperback in 1990.

Cresheim Farm

Cresheim Farm PDF Author: Antje Ulrike Mattheus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000891933
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book is a work of political archaeology. It focuses on the people and events at a particular colonial farm in Germantown, Pennsylvania; their stories provide a micro and macro view of economic, social, demographic, and agro-ecological change. Cresheim Farm shows how one mostly unknown but strategically placed piece of land—home to an extraordinary array of people, including early anti-slavery and anti-Nazi activists, the first woman editor of the Saturday Evening Post and a robber baron—can tell, affect and reflect the history of a nation. The writing is historically grounded and academic, future-oriented, deeply researched, and immediate. Cresheim Farm serves as a lens through which to observe and understand social forces, such as the launching point of freedom and democracy movements, white privilege, slavery, and genocidal westward expansion. The past lives on in all of us.

Multiculturalism in the United States

Multiculturalism in the United States PDF Author: John D. Buenker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313062730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Interest in ethnic studies and multiculturalism has grown considerably in the years since the 1992 publication of the first edition of this work. Co-editors Ratner and Buenker have revised and updated the first edition of Multiculturalism in the United States to reflect the changes, patterns, and shifts in immigration showing how American culture affects immigrants and is affected by them. Common topics that helped determine the degree and pace of acculturation for each ethnic group are addressed in each of the 17 essays, providing the reader with a comparative reference tool. Seven new ethnic groups are included: Arabs, Haitians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Asian Indians, and Dominicans. New essays on the Irish, Chinese, and Mexicans are provided as are revised and updated essays on the remaining groups from the first edition. The contribution to American culture by people of these diverse origins reflects differences in class, occupation, and religion. The authors explain the tensions and conflicts between American culture and the traditions of newly arrived immigrants. Changes over time that both of the cultures brought to America and of the culture that received them is also discussed. Essays on representative ethnic groups include African-Americans, American Indians, Arabs, Asian Indians, Chinese, Dominicans, Filipinos, Germans, Haitians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Koreans, Mexicans, Poles, Scandinavians, and the Vietnamese.

New Directions in American Religious History

New Directions in American Religious History PDF Author: Harry S. Stout
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198027206
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized both where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformative events, and marginal groups and ethnocultural "outsiders." They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in American Protestantism, and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture. Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as David D. Hall, Donald G. Matthews, Allen C. Guelzo, Gordon S. Wood, Daniel Walker Howe, Robert Wuthnow, Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, Harry S. Stout, and John Higham. Taken together, these essays reveal a rapidly expanding field of study that is breaking out of its traditional confines and spilling into all of American history. The book takes the measure of the changes of the last quarter-century and charts numerous challenges to future work.

Almost Chosen People

Almost Chosen People PDF Author: Michael Zuckerman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520909283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Few historians are bold enough to go after America's sacred cows in their very own pastures. But Michael Zuckerman is no ordinary historian, and this collection of his essays is no ordinary book. In his effort to remake the meaning of the American tradition, Zuckerman takes the entire sweep of American history for his province. The essays in this collection, including two never before published and a new autobiographical introduction, range from early New England settlements to the hallowed corridors of modern Washington. Among his subjects are Puritans and Southern gentry, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Spock, P. T. Barnum and Ronald Reagan. Collecting scammers and scoundrels, racists and rebels, as well as the purest genius, he writes to capture the unadorned American character. Recognized for his energy, eloquence, and iconoclasm, Zuckerman is known for provoking—and sometimes almost seducing—historians into rethinking their most cherished assumptions about the American past. Now his many fans, and readers of every persuasion, can newly appreciate the distinctive talents of one of America's most powerful social critics.

Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series

Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series PDF Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher: Copyright Office, Library of Congress
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1696

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Book Description