Rhineland Emigrants

This is a collection of articles pertaining to the European origins of Pennsylvania German immigrants which originally appeared in the magazine "Pennsylvania Folklife," successor to "The Pennsylvania Dutchman." Virtually all the emigrants mentioned in this work are cited with reference to church, parish, and provincial records and other records located in the archival repositories of the old Palatinate and adjoining provinces in southwest Germany; and these emigrants are cited again, where possible, with reference to a corresponding range of Pennsylvania source materials, notably church records, wills, and tax lists. In addition, names of emigrants are collated with Strassburger and Hinke's celebrated "Pennsylvania German Pioneers," from which are drawn dates of arrival, names of ships, and other evidence of immigration.

Cited in BCL3, Sheehy. The new edition includes all the bibliographic citations from the first edition (1981) and its supplement (1984) and adds more than 750 new lists. It is arranged alphabetically by author, with lists included alphabetically by title when no author is known. Full publication inf

The contributors to this collection argue that traditional views - of ethnic and cultural isolation, of German clannishness and Scots-Irish individualism - contain a kernel of truth but are far too restrictive and simplistic.

American historians have long been fascinated by the "peopling" of North America in the seventeenth century. Who were the immigrants, and how and why did they make their way across the ocean? Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to British immigrants who came as free people or as indentured servants (primarily to New England and the Chesapeake) and to Africans who were forced to come as slaves. Trade in Strangers focuses on the eighteenth century, when new immigrants began to flood the colonies at an unprecedented rate. Most of these immigrants were German and Irish, and they were coming primarily to the middle colonies via an increasingly sophisticated form of transport. Wokeck shows how first the German system of immigration, and then the Irish system, evolved from earlier, haphazard forms into modern mass transoceanic migration. At the center of this development were merchants on both sides of the Atlantic who organized a business that enabled them to make profitable use of underutilized cargo space on ships bound from Europe to the British North American colonies. This trade offered German and Irish immigrants transatlantic passage on terms that allowed even people of little and modest means to pursue opportunities that beckoned in the New World. Trade in Strangers fills an important gap in our knowledge of America's immigration history. The eighteenth-century changes established a model for the better-known mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which drew wave after wave of Europeans to the New World in the hope of making a better life than the one they left behind—a story that is familiar to most modern Americans.

Historians usually look for the origins of American political culture among English-speaking people and British constitutional and legal sources. Yet German immigrants to the colonies also contributed to - and developed for themselves - an American political consciousness. In Palatines, Liberty, and Property A.G. Roeber focuses on this neglected subject and explains why so many Germans, when they faced critical choices in 1776, became active supporters of the patriot cause. Employing a variety of German-language sources, Roeber explores German conceptions of personal and public property in the context of cultural and religious beliefs, village life, and family concerns. He follows all the major German migration streams, beginning with the Palatines in New York and including Germans who settled in Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. Roeber's study of German-American ideas about liberty and property provides a unique perspective within a growing historiography on the transfer of culture and beliefs from Europe and Africa to America.