"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.

"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.

A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture - they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and became successful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. The authors' feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST) values women's ways of knowing and working in agriculture and has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture.--COVER.

This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude worked, by identifying how important it was to passenger financing, how shippers profited from carrying immigrant servants, how the labor auction treated immigrant servants, and when and why this method of financing passage to America came to an end.

In July 1909 twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Corey left her Iowa farm to stake her claim to a South Dakota homestead. Over the next ten years, as she continued her schoolteaching career and carved out a home for herself in this inhospitable territory, she sent a steady stream of letters to her family back in Iowa. From the edge of modern America, Bess wrote long, gossipy accounts--"our own continuing adventure story," according to her brother Paul--of frontier life on the high plains west of the Missouri River. Irrepressible, independent-minded, and evidently fearless, the self-styled Bachelor Bess gives us a firsthand, almost daily account of her homesteading adventures. We can all stake a claim in her energetic letters.

Henriette Geisberg Bruns was twenty-three when she arrived in 1836 at the isolated Westphalia Settlement in central Missouri with her husband, baby son, two brothers, and a maid. Jette, as she was known to her family and friends, had not come to America by inclination, but from duty. Her husband Bernhard, a physician, had fallen victim to the emigration fever sweeping Germany in the 1830s and was convinced that he could provide a better life for his family in the American Free States where land was plentiful, the soil was fertile, and taxes were low. Born into a large, prosperous, closely knit family, Jette had set out for the New World reluctantly; but once in Missouri, she was determined not to give up and go back home, as a neighboring family did. Although she maintained her resolve, this collection of letters written to her family in Germany shows that her life in America was often beset by deprivation, disease, and loneliness. Jette had been persuaded to emigrate for the sake of her children's future; however, of the ten born in central Missouri, five died in childhood, three within three weeks in September and October 1841. Despite the family responsibilities and the hardships she faced in Missouri, Jette maintained a lively interest in American political and social life. For fifteen years in Westphalia and almost fifty in Jefferson City and St. Louis, she observed and offered astute--if sometimes acerbic--commentary on the historic as well as the daily events of nineteenth-century life. Left destitute by the death of her husband, who had served as mayor of Jefferson City during the Civil War, she opened a boarding-house in her home across from the state capitol to support her own children and those of her brother. There the German radicals in state government gathered to argue and debate. This rare collection of personal family letters, combined with an autobiographical sketch Jette wrote after the Civil War, illuminates the experience of one immigrant woman in a land that was always foreign to her.