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Review Essay
GERMANS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA: OLD ISSUES, NEW APPROACHES, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory. By Christian B. Keller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. xii + 222 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth).
Wisconsin German Land and Life. Edited by Heike Bungert, Cora Lee Kluge, and Robert C. Ostergren. Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2006. xxv + 260 pp. Maps, graphs, photographs, notes, charts, tables, facsimiles, and index. $24.95 (cloth).
The Whiskey Merchant's Diary: An Urban Life in the Emerging Midwest. By Joseph J. Mersman. Edited by Linda A. Fisher. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007. xliv + 379 pp. Maps, graphs, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, charts, appendix, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
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Each of these works deals with Germans in the United States in the middle third of the nineteenth century, but beyond that, they differ greatly from each other. Chancellorsville and the Germans capably addresses a very old issue in immigration studies while promoting a new thesis on German American assimilation. Wisconsin German Land and Life, on the other hand, concerns immigrant agriculture, a little-studied topic in American ethnic history until recently. Finally, The Whiskey Merchant's Diary anticipates what could become an important dimension of ethnic historical inquiry. Taken together, the diverse topics and approaches of these three works highlight a revitalized field of German American history that helps us better understand the nineteenth-century United States and suggests new paths of inquiry for immigration historians. |
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Christian Keller's book begins with a relatively conventional account of a well-known Civil War confrontation. On May 3, 1863, the New York Times reported that in the battle then raging at Chancellorsville, Virginia, the field position of "Fighting Joe" Hooker's Federals had been badly compromised by "Stonewall" Jackson's Confederates. The reason for this frightening setback, according to the Times, was that the Germans in the Federal XIth Corps had turned and run as soon as they were fired upon. By the time the Federals were definitively defeated a few days later, the story of "the flying Dutchmen" (p. 92) had spread throughout the North. In years later, General Hooker reinforced the myth of German American failings at Chancellorsville, using it to excuse the failure of his campaign. Like most Americans until at least the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Hooker admired French military prowess and denigrated that of the Germans. The story of German American cowardice continued to spread, and while for decades thereafter many participants in the battle, both Anglo and German, contested it, they could not destroy it. Today the facts are not greatly disputed. German Americans comprised only about one-half of the XIth Corps. Some of its units, both German and non-German, did run, even throwing away their weapons, but others returned fire before staging the orderly retreats necessary to avoid being surrounded. All the XIth Corps units were hampered by poor placement and failed Anglo-American leadership at the higher levels, especially that of the XIth Corps commander, General O. O. Howard. Keller makes all these points and more, but most have also been made, if somewhat less forcefully, by other Civil War historians.1 |
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