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IMMIGRATION TO MIDWEST IN 19TH CENTURY.   Term Paper ID:28779 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Analysis of 2 books on topic: "Immigrant Milwaukee" & "Ethnicity on Parade." Authors' themes & use of primary sources.... More...

5 Pages / 1125 Words 1 sources, 10 Citations, MLA Format $20.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Analysis of 2 books on topic: "Immigrant Milwaukee" & "Ethnicity on Parade." Authors' themes & use of primary sources. Paper Introduction: This research will examine two books on immigration to the American Midwest in the nineteenth century: Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860, by Kathleen Neils Conzen, and Ethnicity on Parade, by April R. Schultz. The plan of the research will be to discuss both works with reference to the means by which dominant themes are developed, including the respective authors' use of primary sources. Conzen's Immigrant Milwaukee focuses principally on the dramatic influx of German immigrants to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 25 years before the Civil War. The book is basically a chronicle of the development of a German community within a city that was itself being created, having been founded in 1826. The coping strategies that German immigrants engaged in to assure their economic survival and their identity as an ethnic community were Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The effect of these features of experience was to allow Germanimmigrants to congregate and ease their transition into the Americanmainstream. Whereas Immigrant Milwaukee is organized as a chronicle fleshed out bystatistics and newspaper accounts of German immigrant-community developmentin a Midwest city, Ethnicity on Parade is structured around an event thatmarked the development of a group of immigrants who by and large settled inthe rural Midwest. . . Compare Schultz's descriptionof the appropriation of the Norwegian-as-pioneer-builder image in the 1925pageant as part of the construction of the ethnic narrative (79). . A promotional flier promises"wonderful collections of old Norse relics and those from pioneer days inAmerica--actually thousands of articles of historic value and interest"(Schultz 8). Conzen cautions that19th-century census methods and address or household identification wereprone to error. Because German immigrants in Milwaukee were so numerous, they hadlittle need to learn English immediately. Ethnicity on Parade concentrates mainly onthe documents associated with the pageant, including the script for andnewspaper coverage of Pageant of the Northmen. Conzen's Immigrant Milwaukee focuses principally on the dramaticinflux of German immigrants to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 25 years beforethe Civil War. It is somewhat difficult toreconcile what Conzen takes to be a collectively benign subsumption byGermans of their cultural identity, given the strident romantic nationalismthat was to emerge in 193 s Germany. Theplan of the research will be to discuss both works with reference to themeans by which dominant themes are developed, including the respectiveauthors' use of primary sources. The same general experience attended Irish immigrants inMilwaukee, but they were comparatively handicapped in America because ofwidespread illiteracy in their number. Such an emphasis on ethnicity was bound tocontain an element of tension. Conzen's accountsuggests that for German-Americans in Milwaukee, the collapse wasrelatively painless, a function of the Germans' ability to engage directlywith the momentum of building a frontier town. The Norwegian-American novelist/scholar O.E. But the shape of Norwegian settlementimplies that the immigrants would have been relatively more isolated thanthe "congregation" of Germans to which Conzen refers, hence less likely tobuild a comfortably defined community out of day-to-day interaction. From 1836 to 1846, a plurality of German immigrantshad some little wealth and education; those who came in the decadefollowing were comparatively poorer and less well educated, driven out ofGermany by famine, economic depression, and to some limited extent theRevolution of 1848. As Schultz indicates, this suggests that importance was beingassigned to the event in a way consistent with romantic nationalism as afeature of Norwegian immigrant experience. must be understood not as nostalgia for a perceived authentic past, nor as a symbolic invention divorced from historical realities. Focusing on the Pageant of the Northmen presented inMinneapolis in 1925 as part of the Norse-American Centennial Celebrationand Exposition , to celebrate 1 years of documented Norwegian immigrantpresence in America, Ethnicity on Parade analyzes the symbolic significanceof the pageant as an index of the degree and kind of acculturation ofNorwegian-Americans that had taken place over the course of the previouscentury. Rolvaag was a prime advocate of thistendency. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. Conzen notes the "historicalaccident . The Irish immigrants that came to Milwaukee during thisperiod were distinguished by extreme poverty, which owed something to thepotato famine of the 184 s, and widespread illiteracy. Schultz takes the view that the articulations of Norwegianethnicity in the pageant, the content of which focused on a Norwegianimmigrant's participation in the Civil war, was a species of romanticnationalism, or "national consciousness built upon past traditions andmyths" (94). It took shape as advocacy oflinguistic preservation and attachment to Norway's myth and history thatwere meant to inform and enrich American culture in ways that militatedagainst the "soullessness" of the American materialist ethos. The fact thatNorwegian immigrants as a group settled on farms in the Midwest prairiearea is of course the most obvious distinction, though German and Norwegianimmigrant experiences of the 19th century were of a piece with the biggerpicture of westward expansion. Conzen's method of explaining the accretion of experience, community,and identity for immigrants in Milwaukee between 1836 and 186 illustrateshow a distinct cultural identity could be maintained even as the immigrantsabsorbed the irresistible American culture. Germans, Anglo-Americans, and Irish did not exactly establish ethnic enclaves in the city,but neighborhood patterns organized more or less along ethnic lines. By contrast, Conzen uses censusdata and city directories to construct a statistically based demographicpicture of 19th-century Milwaukee, including occupational profiles thatshow the ethnic distribution of certain kinds of work. The structure can partly be explained by the respectiveauthors' use of primary sources. The coping strategies that German immigrants engaged in toassure their economic survival and their identity as an ethnic communitywere part of a process of acculturation and assimilation into the dominantAnglo-American culture of the US, including active participation in theAmerican political process. Schultz characterizes this as a"dialogue between immigrants and dominant society" (12). Ethnic German concentration fostered the creation of assistancesocieties that included an ethos of a common purse to help new and possiblyimpoverished arrivals. that [Milwaukee's] founding and the opening of Wisconsin tosettlers coincided with the major flow of German emigration" (34).Consequently, the Germans could perceive themselves not only as immigrantsbut also as cofounders of an emerging city. But it emerged at a time when the Norwegian immigrant experiencein America "was rapidly assimilating and Americanizing" (Schultz 129). This research will examine two books on immigration to the AmericanMidwest in the nineteenth century: Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-186 , byKathleen Neils Conzen, and Ethnicity on Parade, by April R. Works CitedConzen, Kathleen Neils. The book is basically a chronicle of the development of aGerman community within a city that was itself being created, having beenfounded in 1826. Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American Through Celebration. On the whole, indeed, theseanalyses of Norwegian and German immigrant acculturation and embodiment inthe American mainstream point to a certain inevitability of cross-culturalcollapse (for white Europeans anyway) into an ethnicity preeminentlyAmerican and only in distant memory European. The account of the immigrant experience in Ethnicity on Parade ismarkedly different from that of Immigrant Milwaukee. Schultz says that the Centennial marked anattempt "to reinvent a Norwegian-American ethnicity suitable to the contextof 192 s America," which entailed "a complicated and contradictory visionof the past and, therefore . Ethnicity on Parade is structured primarily with reference to a singleevent that was organized to highlight the development of Norwegianimmigrants to America. It must be understood instead as a historically grounded act of cultural politics (Schultz 2 ). In other words there emerged a romanticist attachment to the idea ofNorway as the country of origin. Schultz. The Centennial served as a marker for a political exercise in culturalimportance for among Norwegian-Americans. . Irish immigration to Milwaukee was taking placeat roughly the same time, in the wake of the potato famine in Ireland.Although the book's principal focus is on German immigrants, it identifiesethnic distribution and mixing of neighborhoods of Anglo-Americans, Irish,and Germans as part of a gradual Americanization of the entire community. As residents of a frontier farming town, they were more apt tobecome members of the American middle class than part of a disadvantagedurban proletariat. Thus the tension of Norwegian immigrant assimilation was a feature ofdoublethink--a psychic longing for origins and cultural particularity aswell as a determination to become fully Americanized. The very fact ofthe dialogue points up immigrant experience as tension between cultures,predicated of an apparent desire to be defined and perceived as completelyAmerican and as distinctively Norwegian: Ethnicity . Equally, it is difficult to conceivethat the romantic nationalism and cultural tension that might haveproblematized acculturation for Norwegian immigrants could remotelyapproach the intensity of such feelings by non-European immigrants (astoday's multicultural wars tend to confirm). Conzen interprets the presence ofa German community organizations as buffers that protected new arrivalsfrom having to cope in English immediately (6 ; 148). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976.Schultz, April R. On the other hand,Germans' "literate orientation aided in its ultimate acquisition" (Conzen6 ). . Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-186 : Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City. present and future" (Schultz 9). Contemporaneous newspaper coverage of community activitiesin Milwaukee lend human interest to the numbers. . Thisis consistent, however, with what Schultz interprets as the Norwegians'preoccupation with constructing a nationalist identity by the time of theCentennial of 1925. TheCentennial was not so much a retrospective of Norwegian immigrantexperience as an assertion of social value for Norwegian heritage in themidst of an irresistible Americanization. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.