German immigrants and their descendants are integral to New Jersey's history. When the state was young, they founded villages that are now well-established communities, such as Long Valley. Many German immigrants were lured by the freedom and opportunity in the Garden State, especially in the nineteenth century, as they escaped oppression and revolution. German heroes have played a patriotic part in the state's growth and include scholars, artists, war heroes and industrialists, such as John Roebling, the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Thomas Nast, the father of the American cartoon. Despite these contributions, life in America was not always easy; they faced discrimination, especially during the world wars. But in the postwar era, refugees and German Americans alike--through their Deutsche clubs, festivals, societies and language schools--are a huge part of New Jersey's rich cultural tapestry.

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.

284pp. 9 pages of reproductions of original immigration lists; place index and Every Name index. 2000 (1989) This book by two of the best-known German migration researchers documents the German origins, in the Westerwald Region of southern Germany, of more than 265 individuals and/or families which emigrated to America in the mid-18th century. Their German ancestry is included and, in many cases, exactly where they settled in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

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.

SNYNOPSIS Many people may not understand the reasoning of this documentary, and why I am rehashing the expulsions, the after-war tragedies that confronted a defeated nation, the hundreds of internment camps occupied by Germans and German-Americans, the treatment of German Prisoners-of-war upon the conclusion of hostilities, the enforcement of the Morgenthau Plan, and the BenÉs decrees regarding the mass murders of over two million Sudetenlanders, Prussians and other Eastern European Germans. I thought about this and decided that when certain people, whether they be American, British, Russian, French and others, stop their crucifying those of German extraction, then and only then, would it not be necessary to publish this book. The word "Nazi" is archaic, and does not apply to more than ninety percent of all Germans. Most Germans knew nothing about the Holocaust, except what was recently explained to them. They knew nothing about the internment camps where Germans and German-Americans were interned during the war; were unaware of the expulsions of millions of ethnic Germans from their historical homelands; the torture, rape and murder of millions of innocent non-combatant women and children after hostilities had ended; and the deliberate starvation to death of more than one million eight hundred thousand German P.O.W.'s after the war, in complete disregard to the Hague, Geneva and other conventions. This documentary is not singling out others that may or may not be guilty of these atrocities. It is only the truth that we seek to be put into the history books and other texts; not the made-up revisions of Arrogant Revisionists. Much of the information published herewith is not even known by most Germans or people of other ethnic entities. This documentary therefore is one of clarity, reality and truth. It needs to be known! Everyone, Germans and non-Germans alike should read this book, so at least they will know the other side of the story.

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.

""Well researched, readable, and very interesting"" --Choice ""Nazis in Newark is a model local history that reaches well beyond the border of Essex County, New Jersey, to the national and international arenas. By recounting so many sides of the complicated encounter between Nazis and Jews in Newark, Warren Grover has fashioned a world of street politics, boycotts, Nazi louts and Jewish bruisers that is as compelling and telling in its detail as any grand tome on the supposed failures and successes of American Jewish resistence to the Holocaust... I recommend Nazis in Newark. I intend to use it as a cornerstone of my teaching for some time to come."" --Professor Michael Alexander The Jewish Quarterly Review ""Very few people today realize that the U.S. mainland was the scene of battles against the Nazis. Warren Grover has produced an outstanding work on this subject. The writing is incisive, the ideas are both original and insightful and the thesis masterfully developed and executed. Must reading for anyone interested in American history and ethnic studies."" --William B. Helmreich, CUNY Graduate Center and author of The Enduring Community ""Thanks to tenacious research and deft story-telling, Warren Grover has put the politics of extremism in one city in the shadow of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, and has thus illuminated the terrible dilemmas of the 1930s. His book also compels the reader to consider an historical anomaly: champions of the Third Reich come across as victims whose civil liberties were infringed, and the gangs of Newark responsible for these violations tended to be Jewish. Such ironies make Nazis in Newark worth the interest of anyone intrigued by ethnic conflict and politcal violence in urban America."" --Stephen Whitfield, Max Richter Professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University ""In this fast-paced, thorough study of anti-Nazism in Newark, scholar Warren Grover tells th