| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. By Russell A. Kazal. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvii, 383p. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. $35.)
In the last few decades social historians, borrowing from the methodologies of sociologists, have revitalized the study of ethnic groups with detailed case studies of specific towns and cities. Philadelphia has been less well served than other major cities by such studies. Russell Kazal's thorough study of German ethnicity in Philadelphia does much to redress that deficiency.	1
Kazal characterizes his work as "a study of identity change" (p. 5). His analysis is full of the complexity and ambiguity that characterizes the long history and diverse social structure of German America. Concentrating mostly on the period 1890–1940, Kazal traces the long decline of Philadelphia's impressive German American institutional framework, a process beginning in the 1890s and clearly under way before the trauma of the First World War. He also examines the continuing redefinition of German American ethnic identity, even as it slowly faded from the scene.	. . .

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