By the mid-eighteenth century, Carl Friedrich, the margrave of Baden-Durlach, could contemplate with some satisfaction the situation of realm, which consisted primarily of three disconnected clusters of territories scattered along the right bank of the upper Rhine in southwest Germany. From his magnificent new baroque palace in Karlsruhe, the enlightened margrave ruled a territory that was recovering from the destruction that war and pestilence had wrought for decades during the previous century. Public buildings, also in the new baroque style, appeared everywhere in the compact reconstructed villages of the realm. After more than years of relative peace, the once devastated...

Late one night in May of 1743, a group of unmarried young men from Schwaigern met in a barn outside of town for a revel. Schwaigern, located in an area of rolling hills near the Rhine (just southeast of Heidelberg) known as the Kraichgau (see Map 2.1), was a market town that served as the seat of the ruling von Neipperg family. The young men had gathered to celebrate the imminent departure of four of their number: Georg Luttmann, Christian Steinbrenner, Johann Michael Wagner, and Johann Jacob Eichhorn. They began the secret celebration before midnight with food and drink in...

As the hundreds of ships carrying German-speaking immigrants approached Philadelphia, the largest city in North America and one of the largest cities in the British Empire, their passengers tried to put behind them the circumstances of their long, difficult voyage. Many experienced death, exploitation, hunger, and thirst, and almost all experienced storms, sickness, and weeks or months of boredom. The four young revellers from Schwaigern had a very difficult trip lasting twenty-three weeks. Johann Michael Wagner wrote home that the crew packed the passengers on his ship like herrings and that 128 died during the voyage. Among the dead were...

On October 2, 1766, a group made up of twelve girls (aged thirteen to seventeen years), four single women, one married woman whose husband was already in North Carolina, a single man who apparently accompanied the group without permission, and an English preacher and his wife bade an emotional farewell and departed Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the headquarters community of the Moravian church in North America. Traveling with a large wagon, tents, supplies, and nine horses, this “choir,” or living group, of girls (Moravians divided their communities into living groups separated by gender, age, and marital status) began a long migration to...

For a few days in late September and early October 1765 there was a great deal of excitement on the streets of Philadelphia. More than 2,600 German-speaking immigrants from near and far descended on the city to be naturalized during the September Supreme Court session. This was more than one-fourth of all naturalizations in all thirteen colonies during the colonial period, ten times the number in Pennsylvania in 1764, and thirty times the number in the previous court session in April. The future citizens so overwhelmed the court that the officials had to extend their proceedings for more than three...

In the late colonial period and throughout the Revolutionary Era, even as immigration slackened, German society and culture in North America began to flourish rather than dissipate into the larger “American” culture. By 1790 much of the German population still lived in rural, ethnic enclaves—in counties where large portions of the population, if not the majority, were German. Moreover, they continued to speak German, at home and in public. During the Revolutionary Era, the Germanlanguage press expanded dramatically in Pennsylvania and Maryland. German printers produced newspapers, almanacs, broadsides, and books that were among the most important in America. This...