“Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, & Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717 – 1775" at the German American Heritage Center -- April 8.
Friday, April 8, 2 p.m.
German American Heritage Center, 712 West Second Street, Davenport IA
An in-person presentation focused on a fascinating period in German-American history, author Aaron Spencer Fogleman's program Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, & Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717 – 1775 will be held at Davenport's German American Heritage Center on April 8, his book of the same title the first comprehensive account of this 18th-century German settlement of North America.
Fogleman's book utilizes a vast body of published and archival sources, many of them never before made accessible outside of Germany, to emphasize the importance of German immigration to colonial America, the European context of the Germans’ emigration, and the importance of networks to their success in America. In 1700, some 250,000 white and black inhabitants populated the 13 American colonies, with the vast majority of whites either born in England or descended from English immigrants. By 1776, however, the non-Native American population had increased tenfold, and non-English Europeans and Africans dominated new immigration. In Hopeful Journeys, Fogleman demonstrates that of all the European immigrant groups, the Germans may have been the largest, and with the Journal of American History calling his book "accessible to both layman and specialist alike," American Historical Review deemed the work a "major contribution to our understanding of the re-peopling of America in the eighteenth century."
Author and presented Fogleman is a Distinguished Research Professor in the History Department at Northern Illinois University, and his research and teaching interests include forced and free transatlantic migrations, revolution, slavery, religion, and gender in the Atlantic World and Early America. He previously taught at the University of South Alabama and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. Fogleman received the PhD from the University of Michigan in 1991, his M.A. from Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany, and his B.A. from Oklahoma State University. In addition to compiling and co-editing the forthcoming book Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936, Fogleman is also completing a monograph about four centuries of forced and free transatlantic migrations tentatively titled Immigrant Voices, and while he hails from Burlington, North Carolina, he now lives with his family in Batavia, Illinois.
Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, & Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717 – 1775 will be presented on April 8 at 2 p.m. participation is free for German American Heritage Center members and $5 for non-members, and more information is available by calling (563)322-8844 and visiting GAHC.org.
