Is America the new Germany? Focusing on Iowa, this book explores the hidden meaning of that question, and seeks its answer in the forgotten history of nineteenth-century migration. Between 1847 and 1881, more than 300,000 North Germans migrated to the Midwestern state of Iowa. Despite their experiences in the failed revolutions of 1848-1849 in Europe's German speaking kingdoms, leaders among these immigrants developed a program of political change that successfully influenced Iowans through the early twentieth century. The eight essays in German-Iowan Studies focus on both the individuals and the ideas that shaped a powerful vision of America for more than 150 years. Using interdisciplinary approaches and overlooked archival materials, this unique approach to ethnic studies skillfully reconstructs German influence in Iowa and the Midwestern region.

Situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. This volume situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. Running alongside recent post-structuralist theories, the textuality of such matters as literary discourse, history, media, philosophy and religion has emerged as a focal point of debate in the humanities. The essays here examine how questions of the canon, genres, and transformation of texts challenge the present epistemological situation; taking an interdisciplinary approach to textual readings, their methodology is drawn from a range of literary figures and critics, including Lessing, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. The study also addresses the controversial predicament of subjectivity asone of the key terms in current literary and historical scholarship.

With the economic and political rise of East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, many Western countries have re-evaluated their links to their Eastern counterparts. Thus, in recent years, Asian German Studies has emerged as a promising branch within interdisciplinary German Studies. This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies. Essays focus on the mid-century German-Japanese alliance, Chinese-German Leftist collaborations, global capitalism, travel, identity, and cultural hybridity. The authors include historians and scholars of film and literature, and employ a wide array of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies. The collection sheds new light on a complex and ambivalentset of international relationships, while also testifying to the potential of Asian German Studies.

Who owns the West? -- Buffalo Bill and Karl May : the origins of German Western fandom -- A wall runs through it : western fans in the two Germanies -- Little houses on the prairie -- "And then the American Indians came over" : fan responses to indigenous resurgence and political change -- Indians into Confederates : historical fiction fans, reenactors, and living history.

This book takes on a global perspective to unravel the complex relationship between Imperial Germany and its diaspora. Around 1900, German-speakers living abroad were tied into global power-political aspirations. They were represented as outposts of a "Greater German Empire" whose ethnic links had to be preserved for their own and the fatherland’s benefits. Did these ideas fall on fertile ground abroad? In the light of extreme social, political, and religious heterogeneity, diaspora construction did not redeem the all-encompassing fantasies of its engineers. But it certainly was at work, as nationalism "went global" in many German ethnic communities. Three thematic areas are taken as examples to illustrate the emergence of globally operating organizations and communication flows: Politics and the navy issue, Protestantism, and German schools abroad as "bulwarks of language preservation." The public negotiation of these issues is explored for localities as diverse as Shanghai, Cape Town, Blumenau in Brazil, Melbourne, Glasgow, the Upper Midwest in the United States, and the Volga Basin in Russia. The mobilisation of ethno-national diasporas is also a feature of modern-day globalization. The theoretical ramifications analysed in the book are as poignant today as they were for the nineteenth century.

Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs. Iowa’s Native Americans, early explorers, inventors, farmers, scholars, baseball players, musicians, artists, writers, politicians, scientists, conservationists, preachers, educators, and activists continue to enrich our lives and inspire our imaginations. Written by an impressive team of more than 150 scholars and writers, the readable narratives include each subject’s name, birth and death dates, place of birth, education, and career and contributions. Many of the names will be instantly recognizable to most Iowans; others are largely forgotten but deserve to be remembered. Beyond the distinctive lives and times captured in the individual biographies, readers of the dictionary will gain an appreciation for how the character of the state has been shaped by the character of the individuals who have inhabited it. From Dudley Warren Adams, fruit grower and Grange leader, to the Younker brothers, founders of one of Iowa’s most successful department stores, The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa is peopled with the rewarding lives of more than four hundred notable citizens of the Hawkeye State. The histories contained in this essential reference work should be eagerly read by anyone who cares about Iowa and its citizens. Entries include Cap Anson, Bix Beiderbecke, Black Hawk, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, William Carpenter, Philip Greeley Clapp, Gardner Cowles Sr., Samuel Ryan Curtis, Jay Norwood Darling, Grenville Dodge, Julien Dubuque, August S. Duesenberg, Paul Engle, Phyllis L. Propp Fowle, George Gallup, Hamlin Garland, Susan Glaspell, Josiah Grinnell, Charles Hearst, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Hoover, Inkpaduta, Louis Jolliet, MacKinlay Kantor, Keokuk, Aldo Leopold, John L. Lewis, Marquette, Elmer Maytag, Christian Metz, Bertha Shambaugh, Ruth Suckow, Billy Sunday, Henry Wallace, and Grant Wood. Excerpt from the entry on: Gallup, George Horace (November 19, 1901–July 26, 1984)—founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, better known as the Gallup Poll, whose name was synonymous with public opinion polling around the world—was born in Jefferson, Iowa. . . . . A New Yorker article would later speculate that it was Gallup’s background in “utterly normal Iowa” that enabled him to find “nothing odd in the idea that one man might represent, statistically, ten thousand or more of his own kind.” . . . In 1935 Gallup partnered with Harry Anderson to found the American Institute of Public Opinion, based in Princeton, New Jersey, an opinion polling firm that included a syndicated newspaper column called “America Speaks.” The reputation of the organization was made when Gallup publicly challenged the polling techniques of The Literary Digest, the best-known political straw poll of the day. Calculating that the Digest would wrongly predict that Kansas Republican Alf Landon would win the presidential election, Gallup offered newspapers a money-back guarantee if his prediction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would win wasn’t more accurate. Gallup believed that public opinion polls served an important function in a democracy: “If govern¬ment is supposed to be based on the will of the people, somebody ought to go and find what that will is,” Gallup explained.

"A pathbreaking book. Nothing else attempts the broad sweep or comprehensive vision that Heineman offers in this book."—Robert Moeller, author of Protecting Motherhood

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.

How do we explain the persistent preoccupation with American Indians in Germany and the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters as visitors to Indian country? As H. Glenn Penny demonstrates, that preoccupation is rooted in an affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries. This affinity stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. Locating the origins of the fascination for Indian life in the transatlantic world of German cultures in the nineteenth century, Penny explores German settler colonialism in the American Midwest, the rise and fall of German America, and the transnational worlds of American Indian performers. As he traces this phenomenon through the twentieth century, Penny engages debates about race, masculinity, comparative genocides, and American Indians' reactions to Germans' interests in them. He also assesses what persists of the affinity across the political ruptures of modern German history and challenges readers to rethink how cultural history is made.