Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Beverly Smaby, Clarion University

Historians who study immigration to America focus primarily on Europeans who arrived in the nineteenth century, apparently interpreting earlier immigration as the original Europeanization of North America and thus dismissing it as fundamentally different from later periods. This perspective has been contradicted to some degree by recent studies, including Foreigners in Their Own Land.1 In this monograph, Steven Nolt makes the case that the Pennsylvania Germans were the first immigrants to North America, in the sense that they arrived after English-speaking people (English, Irish, and Scots-Irish) had dominated American politics and culture. Although early American historians would argue with the assumption that English, Irish, and Scots-Irish can be lumped together in this way, Nolt develops an important perspective. The Germans' different language did make their adaptation to American life more challenging than that of English borderland people. To negotiate a place for themselves as Americans in this environment, they paradoxically used the rhetoric of rights and liberty to maintain their old-world language and traditions, especially religious ones.	1
It is noteworthy that Nolt sets his study during the period of the early republic (which he defines as 1790–1848), rather than the eighteenth century. Since the great majority of Pennsylvania Germans arrived between 1730 and 1770, Nolt largely focuses on the second and third generations. He claims, however, that even by the end of the colonial period, Pennsylvania Germans had not begun the process of Americanization. They still identified as German, insisted on living near each other in German communities, and cooperated with each other across the lines of their German origins and religious denominations. Nolt argues that the period of the early republic changed this entirely German perspective.	2
As English-speaking Americans themselves struggled to sort out what it meant to be American during this period, their ideology focused around two disparate threads: one emphasized populist leveling and "liberty unfettered by tradition" (p. 23), and the other urged a commitment to republican ideology supported by stability, discipline, and increasing homogeneity. Nolt posits that neither of these models served the interests of most Pennsylvania Germans. As descendants of German "peasant republicans" (who depended on the authority of local political and religious structures to maintain order, tradition, and local character), Pennsylvania Germans resisted the public education that would replace their parochial schools, the federal taxes and other measures of centralized government that would infringe on their local jurisdiction, the revivals sponsored by English-speaking evangelical Protestants that would subsume all Protestants, and the evangelical reforms (such as the barring of Sunday mail delivery) that would help nationalize evangelical morality. To fight these "intrusive agents of change" (p. 31) from outside the community, Nolt argues, Pennsylvania Germans found that the rhetoric of American liberty and separation of church and state proved an acceptable and effective way to defend their separate German churches and culture against assault by the English-speaking majority.	. . .