Civil War Citizens

Civil War Citizens

Author: Susannah J. Ural

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2010-11-22

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0814785719

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At its core, the Civil War was a conflict over the meaning of citizenship. Most famously, it became a struggle over whether or not to grant rights to a group that stood outside the pale of civil-society: African Americans. But other groups--namely Jews, Germans, the Irish, and Native Americans--also became part of this struggle to exercise rights stripped from them by legislation, court rulings, and the prejudices that defined the age. Grounded in extensive research by experts in their respective fields, Civil War Citizens is the first volume to collectively analyze the wartime experiences of those who lived outside the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizenry of nineteenth-century America. The essays examine the momentous decisions made by these communities in the face of war, their desire for full citizenship, the complex loyalties that shaped their actions, and the inspiring and heartbreaking results of their choices-- choices that still echo through the United States today. Contributors: Stephen D. Engle, William McKee Evans, David T. Gleeson, Andrea Mehrländer, Joseph P. Reidy, Robert N. Rosen, and Susannah J. Ural.


Radical Relationships

Radical Relationships

Author: Alison Clark Efford

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-09

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0820368229

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This collection of intimate letters reveals the remarkable radicalism—personal and political—of Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Anneke first became a well-known feminist and democrat in Prussia, earning notoriety for divorcing her first husband and fighting in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849. After moving to the United States, she became a noted proponent of woman suffrage, working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Like many other refugees of the German revolutions, Anneke was deeply involved in the Civil War. Radical Relationships focuses on the years 1859–1865, which encompassed not only the war but also Anneke’s intense romantic friendship with Yankee abolitionist Mary Booth. Over the course of seven years, Anneke supported Mary through her husband’s trial for rape. When Sherman Booth was later imprisoned for his abolitionist activity, Anneke conspired to spring him from jail. The two women then moved with three of their children to Zürich, Switzerland, where they collaborated on antislavery fiction and mixed with leading European radicals such as Ferdinand Lassalle. From Europe, they followed the fate of German-born soldiers in the Union army, including Anneke’s husband, Fritz, and his court martial. Throughout her career, Anneke’s intimate relationships informed her politics and sustained her activism. Her correspondence with Fritz and Mary Booth provides fresh perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the Civil War and gender and sexuality.


German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era

German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era

Author: Alison Clark Efford

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-05-20

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 131602573X

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This study of Civil War-era politics explores how German immigrants influenced the rise and fall of white commitment to African-American rights. Intertwining developments in Europe and North America, Alison Clark Efford describes how the presence of naturalized citizens affected the status of former slaves and identifies 1870 as a crucial turning point. That year, the Franco-Prussian War prompted German immigrants to re-evaluate the liberal nationalism underpinning African-American suffrage. Throughout the period, the newcomers' approach to race, ethnicity, gender and political economy shaped American citizenship law.


We are the Revolutionists

We are the Revolutionists

Author: Mischa Honeck

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0820338230

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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.


Unequal Freedoms

Unequal Freedoms

Author: Jeffery Glenn Strickland

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813060798

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Focusing on Charleston, South Carolina, Jeff Strickland examines the ways that race, ethnicity, and class shaped the political economy of this vital Southern city during the second half of the nineteenth century.


Abolitionizing Missouri

Abolitionizing Missouri

Author: Kristen Layne Anderson

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2016-04-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0807161969

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Historians have long known that German immigrants provided much of the support for emancipation in southern Border States. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri, however, is the first analysis of the reasons behind that opposition as well as the first exploration of the impact that the Civil War and emancipation had on German immigrants' ideas about race. Anderson focuses on the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri, looking particularly at the ways in which German attitudes towards African Americans and the institution of slavery changed over time. Anderson suggests that although some German Americans deserved their reputation for racial egalitarianism, many others opposed slavery only when it served their own interests to do so. When slavery did not seem to affect their lives, they ignored it; once it began to threaten the stability of the country or their ability to get land, they opposed it. After slavery ended, most German immigrants accepted the American racial hierarchy enough to enjoy its benefits, and had little interest in helping tear it down, particularly when doing so angered their native-born white neighbors. Anderson's work counters prevailing interpretations in immigration and ethnic history, where until recently, scholars largely accepted that German immigrants were solidly antislavery. Instead, she uncovers a spectrum of Germans' "antislavery" positions and explores the array of individual motives driving such diverse responses.. In the end, Anderson demonstrates that Missouri Germans were more willing to undermine the racial hierarchy by questioning slavery than were most white Missourians, although after emancipation, many of them showed little interest in continuing to demolish the hierarchy that benefited them by fighting for black rights.


Germans in Illinois

Germans in Illinois

Author: Miranda E. Wilkerson

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

Published: 2019-05-24

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0809337215

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This engaging history of one of the largest ethnic groups in Illinois explores the influence and experiences of German immigrants and their descendants from their arrival in the middle of the nineteenth century to their heritage identity today. Coauthors Miranda E. Wilkerson and Heather Richmond examine the primary reasons that Germans came to Illinois and describe how they adapted to life and distinguished themselves through a variety of occupations and community roles. The promise of cheap land and fertile soil in rural areas and emerging industries in cities attracted three major waves of German-speaking immigrants to Illinois in search of freedom and economic opportunities. Before long the state was dotted with German churches, schools, cultural institutions, and place names. German churches served not only as meeting places but also as a means of keeping language and culture alive. Names of Illinois cities and towns of German origin include New Baden, Darmstadt, Bismarck, and Hamburg. In Chicago, many streets, parks, and buildings bear German names, including Altgeld Street, Germania Place, Humboldt Park, and Goethe Elementary School. Some of the most lively and ubiquitous organizations, such as Sängerbunde, or singer societies, and the Turnverein, or Turner Society, also preserved a bit of the Fatherland. Exploring the complex and ever-evolving German American identity in the growing diversity of Illinois’s linguistic and ethnic landscape, this book contextualizes their experiences and corrects widely held assumptions about assimilation and cultural identity. Federal census data, photographs, lively biographical sketches, and newly created maps bring the complex story of German immigration to life. The generously illustrated volume also features detailed notes, suggestions for further reading, and an annotated list of books, journal articles, and other sources of information.


Hitler's American Model

Hitler's American Model

Author: James Q. Whitman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1400884632

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How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.


Becoming American Under Fire

Becoming American Under Fire

Author: Christian G. Samito

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-10-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0801463769

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In Becoming American under Fire, Christian G. Samito provides a rich account of how African American and Irish American soldiers influenced the modern vision of national citizenship that developed during the Civil War era. By bearing arms for the Union, African Americans and Irish Americans exhibited their loyalty to the United States and their capacity to act as citizens; they strengthened their American identity in the process. Members of both groups also helped to redefine the legal meaning and political practices of American citizenship. For African American soldiers, proving manhood in combat was only one aspect to their quest for acceptance as citizens. As Samito reveals, by participating in courts-martial and protesting against unequal treatment, African Americans gained access to legal and political processes from which they had previously been excluded. The experience of African Americans in the military helped shape a postwar political movement that successfully called for rights and protections regardless of race. For Irish Americans, soldiering in the Civil War was part of a larger affirmation of republican government and it forged a bond between their American citizenship and their Irish nationalism. The wartime experiences of Irish Americans helped bring about recognition of their full citizenship through naturalization and also caused the United States to pressure Britain to abandon its centuries-old policy of refusing to recognize the naturalization of British subjects abroad. As Samito makes clear, the experiences of African Americans and Irish Americans differed substantially—and at times both groups even found themselves violently opposed—but they had in common that they aspired to full citizenship and inclusion in the American polity. Both communities were key participants in the fight to expand the definition of citizenship that became enshrined in constitutional amendments and legislation that changed the nation.