The German Speaking Forty Eighters

Download or read book The German-speaking Forty-eighters written by Charles J. Wallman and published by Max Kade Institute. This book was released on 1990 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Back in print again, this is the story of the "Forty-Eighters," political refugees who fled German-speaking countries in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848. Among their numbers were Carl Schurz, later to become a U.S. senator and advisor to presidents Lincoln and Hayes, and his wife Margarethe Schurz, who founded the kindergarten movement in the United States. Many Forty-Eighters settled in and enormously influenced the growth of Watertown, Wisconsin, which was at one time the second largest city in the state. By consulting source materials in English and German, Charles Wallman has skillfully unraveled the threads that tie the Forty-Eighters and their descendents to the history of Watertown. He chronicles not only the Forty-Eighters who subsequently became prominent in the German-American community of the United States but also those who never moved again and helped make their new hometown a thriving site of cultural and intellectual activity in the nineteenth century.