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Hopeful Journeys

Hopeful Journeys

German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775

by Aaron Spencer Fogleman

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Series: Early American Studies

Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press

272 Pages, 41 illus.

Web PDF
9780812291674
Published: December 2014

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

In 1700, some 250,000 white and black inhabitants populated the thirteen American colonies, with the vast majority of whites either born in England or descended from English immigrants. By 1776, the non-Native American population had increased tenfold, and non-English Europeans and Africans dominated new immigration. Of all the European immigrant groups, the Germans may have been the largest.

Aaron Spencer Fogleman has written the first comprehensive history of this eighteenth-century German settlement of North America. Utilizing a vast body of published and archival sources, many of them never before made accessible outside of Germany, Fogleman emphasizes the importance of German immigration to colonial America, the European context of the Germans' emigration, and the importance of networks to their success in America

List of Tables and Graphs
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Immigrant Society

Ch. 1. A Changing World and the Lure from Abroad
—Recovery and Reconstruction
—Demographic Pressure, Scarcity, and Emigration
—Destinations

Ch. 2. Peasant Communities and Peasant Migrations
—The Case of the Northern Kraichgau
—Aristocratic Resurgence and Peasant Resistance
—Village Boundaries and Overcrowding
—Family and Village Migrations

Ch. 3. Community, Settlement, and Mobility in Greater Pennsylvania
—Community
—Ethnic Settlements
—The Role of the Church
—Stable Ethnics

Ch. 4. The Radical Pietist Alternative
—Radical Pietist Migrations
—The Case of the Moravians
—Migration and the Moravian Community

Ch. 5. Germans in the Streets: The Development of German Political Culture in Pennsylvania
—Germans and Pennsylvania Politics
—Thomas Penn and the Germans
—German Political Interests
—Penn's New Policy and the German Response

Ch. 6. The Structuring of a Multiethnic Society

Appendices
1. Methods and Sources Used for Demographic Calculations in the Thirteen Colonies
2. Volume and Timing of Legal Emigrations from Southwest Germany, 1687-1804
3. Statistics for the Fifty-three Parishes Making Up the Northern Kraichgau Cohort of Emigrants to Pennsylvania, 1717-1775
4. European Origins of German-Speaking, Radical Pietist Immigrants in Colonial America
5. German-Speaking Immigrants Eligible for Naturalization

Notes
Bibliography
Index of Immigrants and Villagers
General Index

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"A major contribution to our understanding of the re-peopling of America in the eighteenth century."—American Historical Review

"A book that is accessible to both layman and specialist alike."—Journal of American History

"The first comprehensive history of the settlement of Germans in the 1700s and how they influenced the economy, politics, and ways of life in the New World."—Pennsylvania