While Germans, the largest immigration group in the United States, contributed to the shaping of American society and left their mark on many areas from religion and education to food, farming, political and intellectual life, Americans have been instrumental in shaping German democracy after World War II. Both sides can claim to be part of each other's history, and yet the question arises whether this claim indicates more than a historical interlude in the forming of the Atlantic civilization. In this volume some of the leading historians, social scientists and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have come together to investigate, for the first time in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration, the nexus of these interactions in view of current and future challenges to German-American relations.

More Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. Arguably, German Americans form America's largest ethnic group. Yet they have a remarkably low profile today, reflecting a dramatic, twentieth-century retreat from German-American identity. In this age of multiculturalism, why have German Americans gone into ethnic eclipse--and where have they ended up? Becoming Old Stock represents the first in-depth exploration of that question. The book describes how German Philadelphians reinvented themselves in the early twentieth century, especially after World War I brought a nationwide anti-German backlash. Using quantitative methods, oral history, and a cultural analysis of written sources, the book explores how, by the 1920s, many middle-class and Lutheran residents had redefined themselves in "old-stock" terms--as "American" in opposition to southeastern European "new immigrants." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners. Becoming Old Stock sheds light on the way German Americans used race, American nationalism, and mass culture to fashion new identities in place of ethnic ones. It is also an important contribution to the growing literature on racial identity among European Americans. In tracing the fate of one of America's largest ethnic groups, Becoming Old Stock challenges historians to rethink the phenomenon of ethnic assimilation and to explore its complex relationship to American pluralism.

A dictionary of German names, the derivations, and meanings.

"Early in the twentieth century, drawing upon the hundreds of letters written to his father by immigrants from Mecklenburg, Germany, Johannes Gillhoff created the archetypal character of Jürnjakob Swehn: the upright, honest mench who personified the German immigrant. This farmer-hero--planting and harvesting his Iowa acres, joking with his neighbors during the snowy winters, building a church with his own hands--proved so popular with the German public that a million copies of Jürnjakob Swehn der Amerikafahrer are in print. Now for the first time this wise and endearing book is available in English." -- Page [4] cover.

Describes why many Germans immigrated to the United States and how they adapted to their new environment.

Provides information on the history of Germany and on the customs, language, religion, and experiences of German Americans.