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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Steven M. Nolt. Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic. (Pennsylvania German History and Cultural Series, number 2; Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society, number 35.) University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 238. $29.95.
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| This cultural history focuses on Pennsylvania Germans of Lutheran and German Reformed background in the process of becoming American. Steven M. Nolt deftly demonstrates that the experience involved a complex interaction in which "majority demands and minority wishes mixed and even furthered ironically complementary ends" (p. 3). As ethnic groups are marked and changed by the American mainstream, he writes, they reforge their identities to reflect the reality of a new cultural context as much as to maintain their heritage. Creating an ethnic identity in America and becoming American are thus related processes—a phenomenon that others, of course, have noticed. |
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