Germans In The Civil War

Download or read book Germans in the Civil War written by Walter D. Kamphoefner and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era written by Alison Clark Efford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Germans in the American Civil War written by Wilhelm Kaufmann and published by John Kallmann Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This singular account of an estimated 216,000 Germans, mostly newly-arrived immigrants and about 300,000 Americans of German descent, who served in the American Civil War is an unprecedented event in the publication of material on U.S. military history. Written by a successful German immigrant, publishing entrepreneur and journalist, Wilhelm Kaufmann, 1847-1920, this book was originally published in 1911 by Munich Publisher R. Oldenbourg in the German Language only. In their Civil War Centennial book, Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography, published in 1967, the distinguished contributors, Allen Nevins, James I. Robertson, Jr., and Bell I. Wiley, wrote of Kaufmann's history: Finally, after two world wars and the consequent anti-German sentiment and the neglect that discouraged publication, a new Edition -- in English for the first time -- is now available. Scholars, general readers, genealogists and people who wish to explore their own German heritage will welcome this penetrating account -- now with enhanced features: readable type, larger maps (36 in all) designed for clarity; and now, most importantly, fully indexed for more effective reference use. Available in both a quality genuine clothbound as well as an economical paperback edition, this history deserves a place on your permanent library shelf. 392pp., 36 maps, bibliography, end notes, index.

Download or read book Damn Dutch written by Christian B. Keller and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first work to highlight the contributions of regiments of the Pennsylvania Dutch and the post-1820 immigrant Germans at the Battle of Gettysburg. On the first day, the 1st Corps, in which many of the Pennsylvania Dutch groups served, and the half-German 11th Corps, which had five regiments of either variety in it, bought with their blood enough time for the Federals to adequately prepare the high ground, which proved critical in the end for the Union victory. On the second day, they participated in beating back Confederate attacks that threatened to crack the Union defenses on Cemetery Hill and in other strategic locations.

Download or read book Learning from the Germans written by Susan Neiman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.

Download or read book Chancellorsville and the Germans written by Christian B. Keller and published by North's Civil War. This book was released on 2010 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The battle of Chancellorsville often remembered as Robert E. Lee's greatest triumph, also became a watershed in German-American history, because Lee's victory came at expense of the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking troops. Poorly deployed in position on the extreme right of the Federal line, this corps was the first struck by "Stonewall" Jackson's famous flank attack of 2 May 1863, and became the scapegoat for the northern defeat. Until now, the history of Germans in the eastern theater of operations has revolved around the rout of the Eleventh Corps and the supposed "flight" of its German regiments in Virginia wilderness. Utilizing previously unresearched German-language newspapers, soldiers' letters, memoirs, and regimental records, and long neglected English-language sources, Keller reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German-American perspective, both military and civilian. He offers us a fascinating window into an ethnic past frequently forgotten or misunderstood, one in which German soldiers' valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. Beginning with a discussion of German-American involvement in the war in the East up to 1863, Keller critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments during the battle and Anglo-American and German-American reactions to its outcome. A key theme running through the book is the idea of nativism, prejudice against the foreign-born by "natives", and how it affected northern German-Americans' perceptions of themselves as both patriots and Americans. Keller shows the ghost of Chancellorsville not only lingered through the rest of the Civil War, but also well into the postwar period, influencing how German-born citizens remembered their sacrifices during the conflict and ultimately assimilated into greater American society--Publisher's description.

Download or read book German Americans on the Middle Border written by Zachary Stuart Garrison and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.