Foreigners in Their Own Land
Foreigners in Their Own Land

Author: Steven M. Nolt

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0271021993

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Historians of the early Republic are just beginning to tell the stories of the period&’s ethnic minorities. In Foreigners in Their Own Land, Steven M. Nolt is the first to add the story of the Pennsylvania Germans to that larger mosaic, showing how they came to think of themselves as quintessential Americans and simultaneously constructed a durable sense of ethnicity. The Lutheran and Reformed Pennsylvania German populations of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Appalachian backcountry successfully combined elements of their Old World tradition with several emerging versions of national identity. Many took up democratic populist rhetoric to defend local cultural particularity and ethnic separatism. Others wedded certain American notions of reform and national purpose to Continental traditions of clerical authority and idealized German virtues. Their experience illustrates how creating and defending an ethnic identity can itself be a way of becoming American. Though they would maintain a remarkably stable and identifiable subculture well into the twentieth century, Pennsylvania Germans were, even by the eve of the Civil War, the most &"inside&" of &"outsiders.&" They represent the complex and often paradoxical ways in which many Americans have managed the process of assimilation to their own advantage. Given their pioneering role in that process, their story illuminates the path that other immigrants and ethnic Americans would travel in the decades to follow.

Sacred Song and the Pennsylvania Dutch
Sacred Song and the Pennsylvania Dutch

Author: Daniel Jay Grimminger

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1580463835

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Sheds light on the process of cultural change that occurred over the course of a century or more in the majority of Pennsylvania German communities and churches. The Pennsylvania Dutch comprised the largest single ethnic group in the early American Republic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet like other ethnic minorities in early America, they struggled to maintain their own distinct ethnic identity in everything that they did. Eventually their German Lutheran and Reformed customs and folkways gave way to Anglo-American pressure. The tune and chorale books printed for use in Pennsylvania Dutch churches document this gradual process of Americanization, including notable moments of resistance to change. Daniel Grimminger's Sacred Song and the Pennsylvania Dutch is the only in-depth study of the shifting identity of the Pennsylvania Dutch as manifested in their music. Through a closer examination of music sources, folk art, and historical contexts, this interdisciplinary study sheds light on the process of cultural change that occurred over the course of a century or more in the majority of Pennsylvania German communities and churches. Grimminger's book also provides a model with which to view all ethnic enclaves, in America and elsewhere, andthe ways in which loyalties can shift as a group becomes part of a larger cultural fabric. Daniel Grimminger holds a doctorate in sacred music and choral conducting, as well as a PhD in musicology. He also holds a masterof theological studies degree and is a clergyman in the North American Lutheran Church. Grimminger teaches at Kent State University and is the pastor at Faith Lutheran Church in Millersburg, Holmes County, Ohio.

Damn Dutch
Damn Dutch

Author: Christian B. Keller

Publisher: Stackpole Books

Published: 2004-02-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0811740323

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This is the first work to highlight the contributions of regiments of the Pennsylvania Dutch and the post-1820 immigrant Germans at the Battle of Gettysburg. On the first day, the 1st Corps, in which many of the Pennsylvania Dutch groups served, and the half-German 11th Corps, which had five regiments of either variety in it, bought with their blood enough time for the Federals to adequately prepare the high ground, which proved critical in the end for the Union victory. On the second day, they participated in beating back Confederate attacks that threatened to crack the Union defenses on Cemetery Hill and in other strategic locations.

Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750-1850
Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750-1850

Author: Jürgen Heideking

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-04-08

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0521800668

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Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States represents the cooperative effort of a group of American and German scholars to move the historical debate on Republicanism and Liberalism to a new stage. Previously, the relationship between Republican and Liberal ideas, concepts and world views has been discussed in the context of American revolutionary and late eighteenth-century history. While the German states did not experience successful revolutions like those in North America and France, Republican and Liberal ideas and 'language' deeply affected German political thinking and culture, especially in the southern states. The essays published in this book expand the time frame of the debate into the first half of the nineteenth century, applying an innovative and comparative German-American perspective. By systematically studying the similarities and differences in the understanding of Republicanism and Liberalism in the United States and German states, the collection stimulates efforts toward a comprehensive interpretation of political, intellectual and social developments in the 'modernizing' Atlantic world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Disenfranchising Democracy
Disenfranchising Democracy

Author: David A. Bateman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 110847019X

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Disenfranchising Democracy examines the exclusions that accompany democratization and provides a theory of the expansion and restriction of voting rights.

The First Reconstruction
The First Reconstruction

Author: Van Gosse

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 759

ISBN-13: 1469660113

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It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.

To Organize the Sovereign People
To Organize the Sovereign People

Author: David W. Houpt

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2023-11-08

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0813950511

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This book explores the struggle to define self-government in the critical years following the Declaration of Independence, when Americans throughout the country looked to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania for guidance on political mobilization and the best ways to create a stable arrangement that could balance liberty with order. In 1776 radicals mobilized the people to overthrow the Colonial Assembly and adopt a new constitution, one that asserted average citizens’ rights to exercise their sovereignty directly not only through elections but also through town meeting, petitions, speeches, parades, and even political violence. Although highly democratic, this system proved unwieldy and chaotic. David Houpt finds that over the course of the 1780s, a relatively small group of middling and elite Pennsylvanians learned to harness these various forms of "popular" mobilization to establish themselves as the legitimate spokesmen of the entire citizenry. In examining this process, he provides a granular account of how the meaning of democracy changed, solidifying around party politics and elections, and how a small group of white men succeeded in setting the framework for what self-government means in the United States to this day.