| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

German Pioneers on the American Frontier: The Wagners in Texas and Illinois. By Andreas V. Reichstein. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2001. xii, 303 pp. $32.95, ISBN 1-57441-134-9.)

A micro-study of German "forty-eighters," German Pioneers on the American Frontier chronicles Julius and Wilhelm Wagner, immigrants to Texas and Illinois from Baden, Germany. Julius arrived in 1847 as a member of a Texas settlement; his older brother Wilhelm arrived in 1851. Andreas V. Reichstein arches upward from individuals to an examination of the assimilation debate: Is the United States tradition of a Jacksonian frontier a "melted pot"?

Reichstein's information derives from Familien-Briefe published in 1977 from a collection of 142 family letters, from Wilhelm's Deutsche Zeitung in Freeport, Illinois, and from descendants. Julius joined the Gesell-schaft der Vierziger, an organization inspired by the Prince von Solms und Braunfels's Adels-verein in Texas, where Julius lived in the Bettina colony near Fredericksburg. As communistic utopias failed during the mid-nineteenth century, Bettina colony disappeared, its members dispersing back to Germany, including Julius, who in 1849 returned for his fiancée.

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