German American History Sources
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Selected Books in Owens Library
Adams, James E. Preus of Missouri and the Great Lutheran Civil War. NY: Harper & Row, 1977.
3rd Floor, 284.1092 A21p
This volume is a journalistic account of the struggle within Concordia Seminary in St. Louis over religious modernism in the 1970s.Arndt, Karl J. R., comp. and ed. A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1814-1824. Indianapolis: Indiana State Historical Society 1975-1978.
3rd Floor, 335.977 D63d, v. 1 & 2.
The Harmony Society was a German American utopian socialist group which moved from Pennsylvania to New Harmony, Indiana and then back to Pennsylvania.Brauer, Leonard and Evelyn Goosen, eds. Hier Snackt Wi Plattdütsch: Here We Speak Low German. Cole Camp, Mo.: City of Cole Camp, 1989.
3rd Floor, 977.8493 O97h
Although done by amateur historians, this is a sophisticated and relatively complete history of the large Hanoverian immigrant community in northeast Benton and southeast Pettis Counties, Mo.Bruns, Henriette. Hold Dear, As Always: Jette, A German Immigrant Life in Letters. Edited by Adolf E. Schroeder and Carla Schulz-Geisberg. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988.
3rd Floor, 977.8 B89h
Jette Bruns, from an elite Catholic family in Westphalia, came with her physician husband to the forest in Osage County, Missouri in the 1830s. Until her death in the 1890s, she wrote home to her family about her difficulties on the Missouri frontier. After decades of rural living, the family moved to Jefferson City. There, after the Civil War, Jette ran a boarding house for Radical Germans in the Missouri legislature. She was never entirely sure her family should have come to America.Burnett, Robyn. German Settlement in Missouri: New Land, Old Ways. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
3rd Floor, 977.8 B96g
This is a short, basic account which assumes no prior historical knowledge.Chrystal, William G. A Fathers Mantle: The Legacy of Gustav Niebuhr. NY: Pilgrim Press, 1982.
3rd Floor, 285.73 C55f
Niebuhr was a minister a century ago in the Evangelical Synod, a German domination headquartered in St. Louis. He served churches in California, Missouri, and Illinois. The author is best known for his famous sons. (See Fox below.)Coburn, Carol K. Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.
3rd Floor, 978.1 C65L
This is a study of the German Lutheran rural community at Block, Kansas near Paola. The author, a professor of education at Avila College in Kansas City, interviewed a dozen elderly persons, most of them women, born near the turn of the last century. The book contains much on family life and much from a woman's point of view.
Conzen, Kathleen Neils. Germans. In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin. 405-425. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.
1st Floor, Reference 973.04 H33h
This is the best place to start for basic factual information on German immigrants in American history. Professor Conzen is Chair of the History Department at the University of Chicago.Detjen, David W. The Germans in Missouri, 1900-1918: Prohibition, Neutrality, and Assimilation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985.
3rd Floor, 977.8 D48g
This is actually a very fine study of the St. Louis chapter of the German American Alliance, and of its leader, who was tried for disloyalty during the First World War. Mr. Detjen is a lawyer.Diamond, Sander A. The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924-1941. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
3rd Floor, 322.42 D53n
This is a well-regarded history of the Deutsch Amerikanische Bund, which was pro-Nazi, and its leader, Fritz Kuhn.Duden, Gottfried. Report on a Journey to the Western States of North American and a Stay of Several Years . . . . Edited by James W. Goodrich. Translated by George H. Kenner, et al. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. (originally published in German in 1829)
3rd Floor, 977.8 D845r
Duden, a German judge, came to Missouri in the 1820s to determine if settlement on the American frontier was practical for Germans. He lived in what is now Warren County west of St. Louis. This report, very favorable to the region, brought thousands of Germans to Missouri and southern Illinois.Dyck, Mary Knackstedt. Waiting on the Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary Mary Knackstedt Dyck. Edited by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.
3rd Floor, 978.1 D99w
The diary, 1936-1941, is written by a second generation German American farm woman in southwestern Kansas.Engle, Stephen D. Yankee Dutchman: the Life of Franz Sigel. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993.
3rd Floor, 973.7092 S574e
Sigel was an officer in the German revolutionary army in 1848-49 in Baden in south Germany. He fled to America and lived for a time in St. Louis. He led Union troops at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in Civil War Missouri and in several battles in the east. He was very controversial, but much beloved by German Americans.Faust, Albert B. The German Element in the United States. NY: Steuben Society of America, 1927.
3rd Floor, 901 F26.
Although originally published in 1909, this is the definitive study of German immigrant contributions to America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.Forster, Walter O. Zion on the Mississippi: The Settlement of the Saxon Lutherans in Missouri, 1839-1841. St. Louis: Concordia Pub. House, 1953.
3rd Floor, 284.1778 F73z
This work is a very detailed history of the early years of the religious dissidents who left upper Saxony in 1839 to come to St. Louis and Perry County, Missouri, and who were among the chief founders of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.Fox, Richard Wightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. NY: Pantheon, 1985.
3rd Floor, 921 N665f
Niebuhr was a leading American Christian moralist at Union Theological Seminary in New York from the 1920s until he fell into bad health in the 1960s. He was admired both for his neo-conservative theology and his liberal views on public policy. He was born in Missouri of German parents and grew up in Illinois. His brother, H. Richard Niebuhr was a leading church historian at Yale.Freidel, Frank. Francis Lieber, Nineteenth-Century Liberal. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1968.
3rd Floor, 921 L71f 1968
Lieber was a very early German political radical who came to the U. S. in the 1820s. He translated and re-worked a German encyclopedia to become the Encyclopedia Americana and did much work on American military regulations while supporting progressive political causes. Unfortunately, this biography was done back in the 1940s when it was not thought important to delve deeply into an immigrant's foreign background and culture.Gerlach, Russel L. Immigrants in the Ozarks: A Study in Ethnic Geography. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976.
3rd Floor, 976.71 G37i
Gerlach has much to say about pockets of German settlement within the Missouri Ozarks and how people of German descent differ from their Anglo-American neighbors in the region. He is a historical geographer at Southwest Missouri State University.Gillhoff, Johannes. Letters of a German American Farmer: Jürnjakob Swehn Travels to America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.
3rd Floor, 833.912 G47L
The author was a teacher in Pomerania who never came to America. The letters proport to be from a Pommeranian peasant who carved out a farm in Iowa in the second half of the 19th century. They are based on letters his father, a village pastor, had actually received from villagers in America. The book is filled with insights into the chatacter of rural immigrants.Gustorf, Frederick J. The Uncorrupted Heart: Journal and Letters of Frederick Julius Gustorf, 1800-1845. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969.
3rd Floor, 917.3 G98u
Gustorf was an educated German who toured the frontier settlements of Missouri and Illinois in the early 1840s. He disliked the primitive conditions he found among German peasants trying to establish themselves on the frontier.Hauser, Heinrich. My Farm on the Mississippi: The Story of a German in Missouri, 1945-1948. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
3rd Floor, 977.8694 H37m
The author, a German writer and adventurer, came to America in the 1930s with his Jewish wife to escape the Nazis. Growing tired of urban life in Chicago, he tried farming in Perry County in the midst of the settlement of Saxon Lutherans who had come to Missouri a century earlier. After sending as much food back to Germany as he could, in 1948 he returned to Germany where he published this book as an adventure story. See especially his tale of floating a John Deere tractor across the Mississippi on a small boat.Hegi, Ursula. Tearing the Silence: Being German in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
3rd Floor, 973.0431 H46t
Reports by Germans born during and after World War II, who immigrated to America, about the shame they feel concerning their heritage.Herbst, Jurgen. The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965.
3rd Floor, 378.73 H53g
It is largely forgotten that much of today's American higher education is based on the seminar and doctoral research models developed in early-19th century Germany. Much of this was first brought to America to Johns-Hopkins University in 1876.Kamphoefner, Walter D. The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
3rd Floor, 305.831 K15w
This book was the first to apply the methods of modern quantitative social history to rural German immigrants. The author matched names from surviving Prussian out-migration lists from the 1830s and 1840s with names from the American censuses of 1850 and 1860 to document chain migration and social and economic mobility. The book began as a University of Missouri Ph.D. dissertation. Its author is a professor at Texas A. & M. University.Kohn, Howard. The Last Farmer: An American Memoir. NY: Summit Books, 1998.
3rd Floor, 921 K79ko
Kohn was an editor for the counter-cultural newspaper Rolling Stone, and is now a journalist in Washington, DC, but his father was a conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran farmer in Michigan. This is the story of the author coming to terms with his father.Köllmann, Wolfgang and Peter Marschalck, German Emigration to the United States. In Perspectives in American History Volume VII, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. 499-554. Cambridge: Charles Warren Center for studies in American History; Harvard University. 1974.
3rd Floor, 973.05 P46p v. 7
Readers will find this an informative account, from the perspective of two German scholars, of why so many 19th century Germans came to America.Kronenberg, Kenneth, ed. & trans. Lives and Letters of an Immigrant Family: The Van Dreveldt's Experiences Along the Missouri. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
3rd Floor, 978.004 K93L
Two brothers, illegitimate sons of a priest in Germany near the Dutch border, left a large country estate there to come to America in 1844 and 1849. One traveled around the Midwest and eventually returned to Germany. The other, after farming in Missouri, eventually kept a store in southern Illinois. These are most interesting letters.Levine, Bruce C. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
3rd Floor, 973.0431 L66s
Skilled German immigrant workers had a major impact on the whole American labor movement.Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.
3rd Floor, 301.453 L94b
This is the best book on the torments suffered by German-speakers in the United States during the First World War. Its author was a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.____________________. Immigrants and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880-1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.
3rd Floor, 323.11 L94i
The title is self-explanatory. This book was written at a time when few people took an interest in German American history.MacArthur, Mildred Sherwood. The History of the German Element in the State of Colorado. San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1972.
3rd Floor, 301.328 M11h
This is a scholarly but short work originally published in 1917.Mallinckrodt, Anita M. From Knights to Pioneers: One German Family in Westphalia and Missouri. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
3rd Floor, 977.8 M25f
Lengthy and well researched, this is the story of the Mallinckrodts, a family of wealthy townsmen from Dortmund in the Ruhr. They came to the eastern Missouri frontier in the early 1830s to become Latin Farmers-- immigrants more familiar with Latin scholarship than with farming. Some members of the family went to St. Louis where they founded a chemical company which purified the uranium for America's first atomic bomb many decades later.Miller, Sally M. Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910-1920. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973.
3rd Floor, 329.81 M65v
Berger was the German American socialist mayor of Milwaukee and a U. S. Congressman.Olson, Audrey L. St. Louis Germans, 1850-1920: The Nature of an Immigrant Community and its Relation to the Assimilation Process. NY: Arno, 1980.
3rd Floor, 305.831 O52s 1980
This was Sister Audrey's doctoral dissertation done some years before the publication date and before the refinement of quantitative social techniques. It is not a lively narrative, but has useful information.Peterson, Brent. Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity: Literature and Community in Die Abendschule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
3rd Floor, 305.831 P48p
This study uses post-modern literary theory to analyze fiction printed in a conservative German family newspaper published in St. Louis for almost a century. The author is now Professor of German at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.Pickle, Linda Schelbitzki. Contented Among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
3rd Floor, 977.004 P59c
In this book, Linda Pickle studied German-speaking immigrant women in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. For many years she taught German at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and then moved to Western Kentucky University.Pochmann, Henry A. German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1978.
3rd Floor, 917.3 P73g 1978.
A study of how American high culture was influenced by the great literature and philosophy of Germany.____________________ New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism: Phases in the History of American Idealism. Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1948.
3rd Floor, 141 P73n
This little book traces the interaction between the Transcendentalists of Boston and Germans and Americans in St. Louis who were devoted to the great German philosopher G. F. W. Hegel. One of the early translations of Hegel's very abstruse German prose into English was made by a St. Louis German who served as Lieutenant Governor of Missouri.Rowan, Steven, trans. Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983.
3rd Floor, 977.8 G37g
The refugees of the European Revolution of 1848 who ran the St. Louis German radical press viewed the coming of the American Civil War as a continuation of the struggle for human freedom which they had carried on in Europe. The German- language press at this time in St. Louis was often more thorough and more sophisticated than the English-language press.Shore, Elliott, Ken Fones-Wolf, and James P. Danky, eds. The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
3rd Floor, 071.3 G73g
The German American radical press was very important for the antislavery movement and for American labor history during the industrial era.Spevack, Edmund. Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
3rd Floor, 303.484 S75c
Follen was a student radical during the post-Napoleonic political reaction in Germany in the early 1820s. After a conservative German playwright was murdered, Follen had to flee to America. He became the first professor of German at Harvard. He became an abolitionist before abolitionists were acceptable even in Boston.Suelflow, August R. The Heart of Missouri: A History of the Western District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, 1854-1954. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1954.
3rd Floor, 284.1 S94h
The title describes the book's contents. There were a number of German Lutheran bodies a century ago. Most are now within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America which also includes a large Scandinavian heritage. The Missouri Synod is largest independent denomination of largely German Lutheran heritage.Todd, Mary. Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 2000.
3rd Floor, 284.1322 T63a
A recent study of the LCMS, the largest conservative Lutheran group in America and a denomination which still declines to ordain women. It is almost wholly of German background.Totten, Christine M. Roots in the Rhineland. NY: German Information Center, 1983.
3rd Floor, 973.04 T71r
This volume is a short, impressionistic account of Germans in America, 1683-1983.Trefousse, Hans L. Carl Schurz, a Biography. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
3rd Floor, 921 S394t
The best modern biography of a 48er, Civil War general, U. S. Senator from Missouri, and U. S. Secretary of the Interior. Schurz' memoirs and other biographies stand with this one the shelf.Ueberhorst, Horst. The German Element in the US Labor Movement: On the Social History of the United States. Bonn: Inter Nationales, 1983.
3rd Floor, 331.88 U14g
This is a short book written by a Professor of Physical Education in Germany.Van Ravenswaay, Charles. The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri: A Survey of a Vanishing Culture. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977.
2nd Floor, Archives 704.03 V27a
This is a magnificent study of the folk-art objects and immigrant architecture which were still existent in the 1960s in the "the Missouri Rhineland." This cultural region extends along both sides of the Missouri River from Jefferson City to St. Louis. The book also contains significant information on early immigration. The author, a native of Boonville, was a leading authority on American material culture and Director of the Dupont-Winterthur Museum in Delaware.Walker, Mack. Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1885. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.
3rd Floor, 325.243 W18g
The best book on the conditions and events in Germany which caused several million Germans to come to America in the 19th century. This was Walker's Harvard doctoral dissertation. He taught there and then at Johns Hopkins.Wittke, Carl F. We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant. NY: Prentice-Hall, 1940.
3rd Floor, 325.73 W83w
Wittke was one of the very few scholars who wrote about German American topics during the 1930s, 40s and 50s when things German were so badly stigmatized in America owing to the two world wars. This book has an excellent chapter on Germans in America.Locate additional books about German American history available in Owens Library using these directions:
- Connect to the Library Catalog
- Click "Keyword"
- Click in the entry box and type german american and history
- Click the drop down arrow next to "Location"
- Scroll down and click "NW Owens General"
- Click
- You will retrieve a list of books about German American history.
All quoted material is from the respective source unless otherwise noted.
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