The German-speaking Forty-eighters
The German-speaking Forty-eighters

Author: Charles J. Wallman

Publisher: Max Kade Institute

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13:

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Back in print again, this is the story of the "Forty-Eighters," political refugees who fled German-speaking countries in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848. Among their numbers were Carl Schurz, later to become a U.S. senator and advisor to presidents Lincoln and Hayes, and his wife Margarethe Schurz, who founded the kindergarten movement in the United States. Many Forty-Eighters settled in and enormously influenced the growth of Watertown, Wisconsin, which was at one time the second largest city in the state. By consulting source materials in English and German, Charles Wallman has skillfully unraveled the threads that tie the Forty-Eighters and their descendents to the history of Watertown. He chronicles not only the Forty-Eighters who subsequently became prominent in the German-American community of the United States but also those who never moved again and helped make their new hometown a thriving site of cultural and intellectual activity in the nineteenth century.

The German-American Forty-eighters, 1848-1998
The German-American Forty-eighters, 1848-1998

Author: Don Heinrich Tolzmann

Publisher: Max Kade German-American Center & Indiana German Heritage Society, Incorporated

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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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.

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.

We Are the Revolutionists
We Are the Revolutionists

Author: Mischa Honeck

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0820339601

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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.

The Forty-Eighters on Possum Creek
The Forty-Eighters on Possum Creek

Author: W. A. Trenckmann

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1933337869

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The Forty-Eighters of Possum Creek: A Texas Civil War Story is a departure for State House Press. This remarkable work of vintage historical fiction focuses on the life of one young man, Kuno Sartorius, who grows up and comes of age in a community of educated German immigrants during the waning months of the Civil War. Author William Trenckmann serialized the novel in his newspaper, Das Bellville Wochenblatt [The Bellville Weekly]. His novel, Die Lateiner am Possum Creek is one of the few works of fiction to treat the plight of the minority Texas Germans during the war. However, it is more than a German story, and provides vignettes of all aspects of life, and of all classes in Texas, on both the home front and the Trans-Mississippi theater. Throughout are the young men from all walks of life brought together by Confederate conscription and facing the same hardships of war. Expertly translated and annotated by James C. Kearney, this novel becomes a shadow memoir of the American Civil War. The educated German settlers of Millheim had fled their native land because of strife and revolution, choosing the bucolic life on the Texas frontier over the sophisticated university towns of Germany. Their children, though, faced uncertainties of their own as Texas seceded and joined the Confederacy and depended on all military aged men to do their part in a cause few Germans in the neighborhood cared for, and to perpetuate slavery which most abhorred. Kearney’s notes help the reader navigate the story, and reveal the “story behind the story.”

Forty Autumns
Forty Autumns

Author: Nina Willner

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0062410334

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In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family—of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own. Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart. In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk. A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family. Forty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs.