Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

Becoming German tells the intriguing story of the largest and earliest mass movement of German-speaking immigrants to America. The so-called Palatine migration of 1709 began in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire, where perhaps as many as thirty thousand people left their homes, lured by rumors that Britain's Queen Anne would give them free passage overseas and land in America. They journeyed down the Rhine and eventually made their way to London, where they settled in refugee camps. The rumors of free passage and land proved false, but, in an attempt to clear the camps, the British government finally agreed to send about three thousand of the immigrants to New York in exchange for several years of labor. After their arrival, the Palatines refused to work as indentured servants and eventually settled in autonomous German communities near the Iroquois of central New York.Becoming German tracks the Palatines' travels from Germany to London to New York City and into the frontier areas of New York. Philip Otterness demonstrates that the Palatines cannot be viewed as a cohesive "German" group until after their arrival in America; indeed, they came from dozens of distinct principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was only in refusing to assimilate to British colonial culture—instead maintaining separate German-speaking communities and mixing on friendly terms with Native American neighbors—that the Palatines became German in America.

Title of the first 10 volumes of the series is Germans to America : lists of passengers arriving at U.S. ports 1850-1855.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude worked, by identifying how important it was to passenger financing, how shippers profited from carrying immigrant servants, how the labor auction treated immigrant servants, and when and why this method of financing passage to America came to an end.

Assembled in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of philanthropist and entrepreneur Henry Shaw (1800-1889), St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw is a collection of nine provocative essays that together provide a definitive account of the life of St. Louis during the 1800s, a thriving period during which the city acquired the status of the largest metropolis in the American West. Shaw, who established the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859, was just one of the many immigrants who left their mark on this complex, culturally rich city during the century of its greatest growth. This volume examines the lives of a number of these men and women, from celebrated leaders such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton and the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot to the thousands of Germans, African Americans, and others whose labor built the city we recognize today. Leading scholars reconstruct and interpret the world that Shaw knew in his long lifetime: a world of contention and of creativity, of trendsetting developments in politics, business, scientific research, and the arts. Shaw's own story mirrored these developments. Born in Sheffield, England, he immigrated to the United States in 1819 and soon moved to St. Louis. Ultimately becoming a very successful businessman and philanthropist, he was a participant in and a witness to the vast economic and cultural transformation of the city.

Jonathan Wagner considers why Germans left their home country, why they chose to settle in Canada, who assisted their passage, and how they crossed the ocean to their new home, as well as how the Canadian government perceived and solicited them as immigrants. He examines the German context as closely as developments in Canada, offering a new, more complete approach to German-Canadian immigration.

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

Analyzes the role of the Germans from Russia in the new land of Oklahoma and the contributions that they made to Oklahoma history.