| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Independent Immigrants: A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri. By Robert W. Frizzell. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. xiv, 202 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978–0-8262–1761–5.)
Guerrilla warfare in Missouri and Kansas, and Germans fighting for the Union—these are well-worn tropes of Civil War history and lore. So is Jesse James, the guerrilla fighter for Southern independence segueing to James, the outlaw fighting the hegemony of eastern capitalism in railroads and banks, essentially the same task. Robert W. Frizzell contextualizes Independent Immigrants, his narration of a rural German immigrant community, within those more familiar stories. Researched and recounted in devoted detail, the work provides useful background information for mid- nineteenth-century U.S. history.	1
Frizzell studied the Hanoverian Germans who settled in Freedom Township, southeastern Lafayette County, in west central Missouri. Esperke, in the Kingdom of Hanover, was the "mother village" of this Missouri community, and Frizzell spends the first chapter describing the zone of origin in what is now north central Germany. He is able to identify many emigrant households in Esperke; situate them on a socioeconomic scale of landownership and social status; and then associate those households with their immigrant situations in Missouri. Reasons to leave included economic stress and opportunity; compulsory military service in post-Napoleonic Europe; and preservation of their traditional smallholder society. Those motivations are common to many rural immigrants, and Frizzell cites the work of Walter Kamphoefner and Kathleen Neils Conzen, in particular Kamphoefner's research on Westfalians in Missouri.	. . .

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