| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. By Russell A. Kazal. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xx, 383 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-05015-5.)

It is a widely known fact, though rarely commented upon, that people of German origin, the largest of European immigrant groups in American society, have the weakest identity as an ethnic collectivity. To understand this anomaly and to penetrate its complexities on a local level is the goal of this excellent history by Russell A. Kazal. By analyzing one major city, Philadelphia, which from its origins in the seventeenth century has had a very large proportion of German-origin inhabitants, the author demonstrates how these people retreated from a relatively strong ethnic identity to a conformist self-image as "Old Stock," unwilling "to advertise their German heritage, a reluctance that continues to this day" (p. 261).

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