As a result of the nineteenth-century German emigration to the United States, St. Louis, Missouri, along with Milwaukee and Cincinnati, would become constituted as the great "German triangle" of the Midwest. In 1893, Ernst Kargau, a reporter and editor for various German-American newspapers, published a German language commemorative history of St. Louis' German population entitled St. Louis in Former Years. Kargau's urban memoir constitutes one of the best snapshots we have of culture and society in a German-American community on the eve of World War I.

A history of the German presence in the American Southwest, from the mid-nineteenth century through the World War I era.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants left Europe for the United States. Many settled in the Northeast, but some boarded trains and made their way west. Focusing on the cities of Fort Wayne, Indiana and St Louis, Missouri, Regina Donlon employs comparative and transnational methodologies in order to trace their journeys from arrival through their emergence as cultural, social and political forces in their communities. Drawing comparisons between large, industrial St Louis and small, established Fort Wayne and between the different communities which took root there, Donlon offers new insights into the factors which shaped their experiences—including the impact of city size on the preservation of ethnic identity, the contrasting concerns of the German and Irish Catholic churches and the roles of women as social innovators. This unique multi-ethnic approach illuminates overlooked dimensions of the immigrant experience in the American Midwest.

This new volume of original essays focuses on the presence of European ethnic culture in American society since 1830. Among the topics explored in Immigrant America are the alienation and assimilation of immigrants; the immigrant home and family as a haven of ethnicity; religion, education and employment as agents of acculturation; and the contours of ethnic community in American society.