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A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Widely remembered as a time of heated debate over the westward expansion of slavery, the 1850s in the United States was also a period of mass immigration. As the sectional conflict escalated, discontented Europeans came in record numbers, further dividing the young republic over issues of race, nationality, and citizenship. The arrival of German-speaking “Forty-Eighters,” refugees of the failed European revolutions of 1848–49, fueled apprehensions about the nation's future. Reaching America did not end the foreign revolutionaries' pursuit of freedom; it merely transplanted it. In We Are the Revolutionists, Mischa Honeck offers a fresh appraisal of these exiled democrats by probing their relationship to another group of beleaguered agitators: America's abolitionists. Honeck details how individuals from both camps joined forces in the long, dangerous battle to overthrow slavery. In Texas and in cities like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Boston this cooperation helped them find new sources of belonging in an Atlantic world unsettled by massive migration and revolutionary unrest. Employing previously untapped sources to write the experience of radical German émigrés into the abolitionist struggle, Honeck elucidates how these interethnic encounters affected conversations over slavery and emancipation in the United States and abroad. Forty-Eighters and abolitionists, Honeck argues, made creative use not only of their partnerships but also of their disagreements to redefine notions of freedom, equality, and humanity in a transatlantic age of racial construction and nation making.
Before the Civil War, Northern, Southern, and Western political cultures crashed together on the middle border, where the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers meet. German Americans who settled in the region took an antislavery stance, asserting a liberal nationalist philosophy rooted in their revolutionary experience in Europe that emphasized individual rights and freedoms. By contextualizing German Americans in their European past and exploring their ideological formation in failed nationalist revolutions, Zachary Stuart Garrison adds nuance and complexity to their story. Liberal German immigrants, having escaped the European aristocracy who undermined their revolution and the formation of a free nation, viewed slaveholders as a specter of European feudalism. During the antebellum years, many liberal German Americans feared slavery would inhibit westward progress, and so they embraced the Free Soil and Free Labor movements and the new Republican Party. Most joined the Union ranks during the Civil War. After the war, in a region largely opposed to black citizenship and Radical Republican rule, German Americans were seen as dangerous outsiders. Facing a conservative resurgence, liberal German Republicans employed the same line of reasoning they had once used to justify emancipation: A united nation required the end of both federal occupation in the South and special protections for African Americans. Having played a role in securing the Union, Germans largely abandoned the freedmen and freedwomen. They adopted reconciliation in order to secure their place in the reunified nation. Garrison’s unique transnational perspective to the sectional crisis, the Civil War, and the postwar era complicates our understanding of German Americans on the middle border.
This study reframes Civil War-era history, arguing that the Franco-Prussian War contributed to a dramatic pivot in Northern commitment to African-American rights.
The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.
German Americans were one of the largest immigrant groups in the Civil War era, and they comprised nearly 10 percent of all Union troops. Yet little attention has been paid to their daily lives--both on the battlefield and on the home front--during the war. This collection of letters, written by German immigrants to friends and family back home, provides a new angle to our understanding of the Civil War experience and challenges some long-held assumptions about the immigrant experience at this time. Originally published in Germany in 2002, this collection contains more than three hundred letters written by seventy-eight German immigrants--men and women, soldiers and civilians, from the North and South. Their missives tell of battles and boredom, privation and profiteering, motives for enlistment and desertion and for avoiding involvement altogether. Although written by people with a variety of backgrounds, these letters describe the conflict from a distinctly German standpoint, the editors argue, casting doubt on the claim that the Civil War was the great melting pot that eradicated ethnic antagonisms.
Historians have long known that German immigrants provided much of the support for emancipation in southern Border States. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri, however, is the first analysis of the reasons behind that opposition as well as the first exploration of the impact that the Civil War and emancipation had on German immigrants' ideas about race. Anderson focuses on the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri, looking particularly at the ways in which German attitudes towards African Americans and the institution of slavery changed over time. Anderson suggests that although some German Americans deserved their reputation for racial egalitarianism, many others opposed slavery only when it served their own interests to do so. When slavery did not seem to affect their lives, they ignored it; once it began to threaten the stability of the country or their ability to get land, they opposed it. After slavery ended, most German immigrants accepted the American racial hierarchy enough to enjoy its benefits, and had little interest in helping tear it down, particularly when doing so angered their native-born white neighbors. Anderson's work counters prevailing interpretations in immigration and ethnic history, where until recently, scholars largely accepted that German immigrants were solidly antislavery. Instead, she uncovers a spectrum of Germans' "antislavery" positions and explores the array of individual motives driving such diverse responses.. In the end, Anderson demonstrates that Missouri Germans were more willing to undermine the racial hierarchy by questioning slavery than were most white Missourians, although after emancipation, many of them showed little interest in continuing to demolish the hierarchy that benefited them by fighting for black rights.
In Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843, Andrea Major asks why, at a time when the East India Company's expansion in India, British abolitionism, and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied, or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India and the official, evangelical, and popular discourses that surrounded them, she seeks to uncover the various political, economic, and ideological agendas that allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from its transatlantic counterpart.
The booklet opens with the Delaware Indians prior to 1818. White Americans quickly replaced the natives. Germanic people arrived during the mid-nineteenth century. African American indentured servants and free blacks migrated to Indianapolis. After the Civil War, southern blacks poured into the city. Fleeing war and political unrest, thousands of eastern and southern Europeans came to Indianapolis. Anti-immigration laws slowed immigration until World War II. Afterward, the city welcomed students and professionals from Asia and the Middle East and refugees from war-torn countries such as Vietnam and poor countries such as Mexico. Today, immigrants make Indianapolis more diverse and culturally rich than ever before.
This book, the latest in the Seminar Studies in History series, examines the movement to abolish slavery in the US, from the origins of the movement in the eighteenth century through to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Books in this Seminar Studies in History series bridge the gap between textbook and specialist survey and consists of a brief "Introduction" and/or "Background" to the subject, valuable in bringing the reader up-to-speed on the area being examined, followed by a substantial and authoritative section of "Analysis" focusing on the main themes and issues. There is a succinct "Assessment" of the subject, a generous selection of "Documents" and a detailed bibliography. Stanley Harrold provides an accessible introduction to the subject, synthesizing the enormous amount of literature on the topic. American Abolitionists explores "the roles of slaves and free blacks in the movement, the importance of empathy among antislavery whites for the suffering slaves, and the impact of abolitionism upon the sectional struggle between the North and the South". Within a basic chronological framework the author also considers more general themes such as black abolitionists, feminism, and anti-slavery violence. For readers interested in American history.
A vividly told tale of a forgotten American hero—an impassioned newsman who fought for the right to speak out against slavery. The history of the fight for free press has never been more vital in our own time, when journalists are targeted as “enemies of the people.” In this bnrilliant and rigorously researched history, award-winning journalist and author Ken Ellingwood animates the life and times of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. First to Fall illuminates this flawed yet heroic figure who made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for free press rights in a time when the First Amendment offered little protection for those who dared to critique America’s “peculiar institution.” Culminating in Lovejoy’s dramatic clashes with the pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois—who were torching printing press after printing press—First to Fall will bring Lovejoy, his supporters and his enemies to life during the raucous 1830s at the edge of slave country. It was a bloody period of innovation, conflict, violent politics, and painful soul-searching over pivotal issues of morality and justice. In the tradition of books like The Arc of Justice, First to Fall elevates a compelling, socially urgent narrative that has never received the attention it deserves. The book will aim to do no less than rescue Lovejoy from the footnotes of history and restore him as a martyr whose death was not only a catalyst for widespread abolitionist action, but also inaugurated the movement toward the free press protections we cherish so dearly today.