The Forty-eighters: a 150th anniversary assessment / Don Heinrich Tolzmann -- German political refugees in the United States (1815 to 1860) / Ernest Bruncken -- The Forty-eighters, the major figures / M.J. Becker -- A German-American position statement: the Louisville Platform / Don Heinrich Tolzmann.

Why some of the most vulnerable communities in Europe, from independent cities to new monarchies, welcomed refugees during the Age of Revolutions and prospered “Janet Polasky unearths an unappreciated history of the experience of asylum in Europe and the United States since the Age of the Democratic Revolutions. Facing squarely the destruction of asylum in our own time, she ends with a stunningly optimistic vision of a path toward its reconstruction.”—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies Driven from their homelands, refugees from ancient times to the present have sought asylum in worlds turned upside down. Theirs is an age‑old story. So too are the solutions to their plight. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, thousands of men and women took to the roads and waterways on both sides of the Atlantic—refugees in search of their inalienable rights. Although larger nations fortified their borders and circumscribed citizenship, two port cities, German Hamburg and Danish Altona, opened their doors, as did the federated Swiss cantons and the newly independent Belgian monarchy. The refugees thrived and the societies that harbored them prospered. The United States followed, not only welcoming waves of immigrants in the mid‑nineteenth century but offering them citizenship as well. In this remarkable story of the first modern refugee crisis, historian Janet Polasky shows how open doors can be a viable alternative to the building of border walls.

The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force—not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled contributions that interpret a number of political, cultural, and religious aspects of the transatlantic relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors discuss a variety of subjects, including European colonization, travel accounts of southerners visiting Europe, and the experiences of German immigrants who settled in the South. The collection also examines slavery, foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign government, the lynching of African Americans and Italian immigrants, and transatlantic religious fundamentalism. Finally, it addresses international perceptions of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement as a framework for understanding race relations in the United Kingdom after World War II. Featuring contributions from leading scholars based in the United States and Europe, this illuminating volume explores the South from an international perspective and offers a new context from which to consider the region's history.

The first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject of the transatlantic religious divide. Using nineteenth and early twentieth century commentary on the subject, Howard helps us understand why Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts.

A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Widely remembered as a time of heated debate over the westward expansion of slavery, the 1850s in the United States was also a period of mass immigration. As the sectional conflict escalated, discontented Europeans came in record numbers, further dividing the young republic over issues of race, nationality, and citizenship. The arrival of German-speaking “Forty-Eighters,” refugees of the failed European revolutions of 1848–49, fueled apprehensions about the nation’s future. Reaching America did not end the foreign revolutionaries’ pursuit of freedom; it merely transplanted it. In We Are the Revolutionists, Mischa Honeck offers a fresh appraisal of these exiled democrats by probing their relationship to another group of beleaguered agitators: America’s abolitionists. Honeck details how individuals from both camps joined forces in the long, dangerous battle to overthrow slavery. In Texas and in cities like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Boston this cooperation helped them find new sources of belonging in an Atlantic world unsettled by massive migration and revolutionary unrest. Employing previously untapped sources to write the experience of radical German émigrés into the abolitionist struggle, Honeck elucidates how these interethnic encounters affected conversations over slavery and emancipation in the United States and abroad. Forty-Eighters and abolitionists, Honeck argues, made creative use not only of their partnerships but also of their disagreements to redefine notions of freedom, equality, and humanity in a transatlantic age of racial construction and nation making.

Ever since they first set foot in the United States, Gitta and Joachim "Yogi" Reppmann have been a living Ưexample of the furthering of German-American friendship. Cultural exchanges between Germany and the American Midwest (the "Heartland"), formerly an important destination for German emigrants, have been a major focus of their lives. Drawing on his experiences of four decades spent in two continents, Yogi Reppmann describes differences in mentality and offers his Ưresearch on the legacy for America of the German democratic revolutionaries of 1848. Dieter E. Wilhelmy, a journalist with the Flensburg Journal, discusses German-American relations with this historian, who spends equal lengths of time in Northfield, Minnesota and in Flensburg, Germany. They analyze typical German images of America, the "soul" of the country, and what lies hidden behind these various notions

Europe was swept by a wave of revolution in 1848 that had repercussions stretching well beyond the Continent. Governments fell in quick succession or conceded significant reforms, before being rolled back by conservative reaction. Though widely perceived as a failure, the revolution ended the vestiges of feudalism, broadened civil society and strengthened the state prior to the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This volume brings together essays from leading specialists on the international dimension, national experiences, political mobilisation, reaction and legacy.

This work is the first monograph which closely examines the role of the German minority in the American South during the Civil War. In a comparative analysis of German civic leaders, businessmen, militia officers and blockade runners in Charleston, New Orleans and Richmond, it reveals a German immigrant population which not only largely supported slavery, but was also heavily involved in fighting the war. A detailed appendix includes an extensive survey of primary and secondary sources, including tables listing the members of the all-German units in Virginia, South Carolina and Louisiana, with names, place of origin, rank, occupation, income, and number of slaves owned. This book is a highly useful reference work for historians, military scholars and genealogists conducting research on Germans in the American Civil War and the American South.

Often overlooked because of their high degree of assimilation, people of German descent are actually the largest single ethnic group in the United States. German culture is far more rooted in America than commonly thought. For example, hot dogs, hamburgers and beer wouldn't be classic American staples without German immigrants. In addition to enormous contributions to mainstream beer culture and food culture, they have also added to America's agriculture, religious values and economy. This history highlights German contributions to America, examining their roles from the earliest colonies through the settlement of the Old Northwest and past the Interwar Period. While most German immigrants belonged to the main Lutheran and Reformed churches, a diverse cast of immigrant groups is encountered, including Moravians, Huguenots, and Rhinelanders. Through them, discover the long-standing history of the German descendants and their impact in the United States beginning more than 200 years ago.