Germans in America

Germans in America PDF Author: Walter D. Kamphoefner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442264985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book offers a fresh look at the Germans—the largest and perhaps the most diverse foreign-language group in 19th century America. Drawing upon the latest findings from both sides of the Atlantic, emphasizing history from the bottom up and drawing heavily upon examples from immigrant letters, this work presents a number of surprising new insights. Particular attention is given to the German-American institutional network, which because of the size and diversity of the immigrant group was especially strong. Not just parochial schools, but public elementary schools in dozens of cities offered instruction in the mother tongue. Only after 1900 was there a slow transition to the English language in most German churches. Still, the anti-German hysteria of World War I brought not so much a sudden end to cultural preservation as an acceleration of a decline that had already begun beforehand. It is from this point on that the largest American ethnic group also became the least visible, but especially in rural enclaves, traces of the German culture and language persisted to the end of the twentieth century.

Germans in America

Germans in America PDF Author: Walter D. Kamphoefner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442264985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers a fresh look at the Germans—the largest and perhaps the most diverse foreign-language group in 19th century America. Drawing upon the latest findings from both sides of the Atlantic, emphasizing history from the bottom up and drawing heavily upon examples from immigrant letters, this work presents a number of surprising new insights. Particular attention is given to the German-American institutional network, which because of the size and diversity of the immigrant group was especially strong. Not just parochial schools, but public elementary schools in dozens of cities offered instruction in the mother tongue. Only after 1900 was there a slow transition to the English language in most German churches. Still, the anti-German hysteria of World War I brought not so much a sudden end to cultural preservation as an acceleration of a decline that had already begun beforehand. It is from this point on that the largest American ethnic group also became the least visible, but especially in rural enclaves, traces of the German culture and language persisted to the end of the twentieth century.

GIs and Fräuleins

GIs and Fräuleins PDF Author: Maria Höhn
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s. Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Swastika Nation

Swastika Nation PDF Author: Arnie Bernstein
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250006716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A history of the German-American Bund traces the efforts of Fritz Kuhn and his followers to overthrow the U.S. government with a fascist dictatorship, tracing their private and public meetings, the development of their own version of the SS and Hitler Youth and the politicians, lawyer, journalist and criminals who used respective means to counter the movement.

Becoming Old Stock

Becoming Old Stock PDF Author: Russell A. 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.

Bonds of Loyalty

Bonds of Loyalty PDF Author: Frederick C. Luebke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description


The German-Americans

The German-Americans PDF Author: La Vern J. Rippley
Publisher: Boston : Twayne Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Represents the German-American experience in the United States. Provides a German-American Chronology section to assist with orientation in historical time. Includes some of the key events in the history of Germany.

Hitler's American Friends

Hitler's American Friends PDF Author: Bradley W. Hart
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
ISBN: 1250148960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

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 : 240

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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.

Degrees of Allegiance

Degrees of Allegiance PDF Author: Petra DeWitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Historians have long argued that the Great War eradicated German culture from American soil. Degrees of Allegiance examines the experiences of German-Americans living in Missouri during the First World War, evaluating the personal relationships at the local level that shaped their lives and the way that they were affected by national war effort guidelines. Spared from widespread hate crimes, German-Americans in Missouri did not have the same bleak experiences as other German-Americans in the Midwest or across America. But they were still subject to regular charges of disloyalty, sometimes because of conflicts within the German-American community itself. Degrees of Allegiance updates traditional thinking about the German-American experience during the Great War, taking into account not just the war years but also the history of German settlement and the war’s impact on German-American culture.

History of German immigration in the United States : and successful German-Americans and their descendants

History of German immigration in the United States : and successful German-Americans and their descendants PDF Author: George von Skal
Publisher: Dalcassian Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description