1608 -
Several Germans were among the settlers at Jamestown.
1626 - Peter Minuit, a German, came to New Amsterdam to serve as the governor
of the Dutch colony, New Netherlands. Later he governed the Swedish colony
in Delaware.
1683 - Thirteen families of German Mennonites seeking religious
freedom arrived
in Pennsylvania; led by Franz Pastorius, they purchased 43,000 acres
of land and founded Germantown, six miles north of Philadelphia.
An elderly Amish couple,
c. 1940.
Prints and Photographs Division |
The Conestoga wagon was first designed and built by German settlers in
Pennsylvania.
Prints and Photographs Division
LC-USZ62-24396. |
1700s - The
settling of the British colonies by small German-speaking
religious groups continued. The groups included Swiss Mennonites,
Baptist Dunkers,
Schwenkfelders, Moravians, Amish, and Waldensians; most German immigrants
belonged to the main Lutheran and Reformed churches. The
central colonies received the greatest part of this immigration,
especially Pennsylvania.
As many as half of these immigrants came as redemptioners, that is,
they agreed to work in America for four to seven years in exchange
for free
passage across the Atlantic. German settlers designed and built the
Conestoga wagon, which was used in the opening of the American Frontier.
1731 - Protestants were expelled from Salzburg,
Austria, in this year. They
subsequently founded Ebenezer, Georgia.
Two German 18th-century maps of Ebenezer, Georgia.
Prints
and Photographs Division
|
The
title page to the music manuscript Paradisisches
Wunder-
Spiel... (Ephrata, Pennsylvania, 1754) is a fine example of the intricate
German Fraktur script used at the Ephrata, Pennsylvania religious community.
Music Division |
1732 - The first German-language newspaper, Philadelphische
Zeitung, was published
in the United States. German publishing flourished in Philadelphia and
in smaller communities such as Ephrata, Pennsylvania.
1733 - John Peter Zenger, who came to America as an indentured servant from
the Palatinate region of Germany, founded a newspaper, The New-York Weekly
Journal; two years later he was acquitted in a landmark trial involving
freedom of the press.
An early edition of the Philadelphische Zeitung.
The lead story is about a peace treaty between Persia and
the Turkish Empire.
Serial and Government
Publications Division
|
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
founded by Moravians in 1741, is shown here in an illustration
from the late 18th century.
Prints and Photographs Division
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1741 - Moravians founded Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pennsylvania.
1742 - Christopher Saur, a German printer in Philadelphia, printed the first
Bible in America.
1778 - General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian officer, became inspector
general of the Continental Army.
1783 - As many as 5,000 of the Hessian soldiers hired by Britain to fight in
the Revolutionary War remained in America after the end of hostilities.
1784 - John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) left his village of Waldorf in Germany and
arrived in the United States in 1784 with $25 and seven flutes. He amassed
a fortune from real estate dealings and the fur trade, and at his death
was by far the richest man in the country, worth an estimated $20 million.
1790 - By this date as many as 100,000 Germans may have immigrated to America;
they and their descendants made up an estimated 8.6 percent of the population
of the United States; in Pennsylvania they accounted for 33 percent of
the population; in Maryland for 12 percent.
1804 - A Protestant group from Wuerttemberg, named Rappists after their leader
George Rapp, founded Harmony, Pennsylvania, a utopian community.
1814 - The Rappists purchased 30,000 acres of land in Indiana and founded a
new settlement, New Harmony. In 1825 they returned to Pennsylvania and
founded Economy, 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Other towns founded
by religious groups in this period included Zoar, Ohio, Amana, Iowa,
and St. Nazianz, Wisconsin.
Thomas Nast (1840-1902) came to America as a child and became
famous as a political cartoonist, especially for his drawings during the
1870s of the notoriously corrupt New York politician William Marcy "Boss" Tweed.
Prints and Photographs Division
|
This Nast drawing of Santa Claus is seen even today during
the Christmas
season.
Prints and Photographs Division
|
1821 - The Germanic custom of having a specially
decorated tree at Christmas time was introduced to America by Pennsylvania
Dutch in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Later in the century, the Pennsylvania Dutch version of St. Nicholas,
Sinterklaas, evolved into America's Santa Claus, popularized by a German
immigrant and influential political cartoonist, Thomas Nast. The Easter
bunny and Easter eggs were also brought to this country by German immigrants.
1829 - Gottfried Duden published in Germany his idyllic account of the several
years he spent as a settler in Missouri; so popular that it appeared
in three editions, the book caused numerous Germans to leave for the
New World.
1836 - John Nepomucene Neumann (1811-60) arrived in the United States in 1836
from his native Bohemia to work as a priest in the country's German-speaking
Roman Catholic communities. He founded the first American diocesan school
system, and in 1852 became Bishop of Philadelphia. In 1977 he was canonized
as a saint by Pope Paul VI.
1837 - The German Philadelphia Settlement Society was founded and purchased
12,000 acres of land in Gasconade County, Missouri; two years later the
society's town of Hermann was incorporated with 450 inhabitants.
1844 - Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels sailed to America with three ships and
150 families to settle in Texas; the following year, New Braunfels, Texas,
was established.
1847 - The Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church was founded by German immigrants
to combat what they saw as the liberalization of Lutheranism in America.
In addition to being a man of action,
Carl Schurz (1829-1906) was
also an able writer of biographies: his own and one of Henry Clay, a politician
he much admired.
Prints and Photographs Division
|
1848-49 - The failure of the revolutions of 1848 to establish democracy caused
thousands to leave Germany to settle in America; the most famous of these
refugees was Carl Schurz. He later served as a Union general in the Civil
War, a United States senator from Missouri, and secretary of the interior
under President Rutherford B. Hayes.
1850s - Nearly one million Germans immigrated to America in this decade, one
of the peak periods of German immigration; in 1854 alone, 215,000 Germans
arrived in this country.
1856 - Margaretha Meyer Schurz, a German immigrant and wife of Carl Schurz,
established the first kindergarten in America at Watertown, Wisconsin.
Adolphus Busch
(1839-1913)
Prints and Photographs Division
|
1857 - Adolphus Busch (1839-1913) left the Rhineland and settled in St. Louis,
Missouri. Four years later, he married the daughter of a prosperous brewer.
In addition to children, this union resulted in the founding of what
was soon to become an industry giant with holdings across the country:
the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association.
1860 - An estimated 1.3 million German-born immigrants resided in the United
States; 200 German-language magazines and newspapers were published in
this country; in St. Louis alone, there were seven German-language newspapers.
1872 - The century-old privileges granted to German farmers settled in Russia
were revoked by the Tsarist government, causing thousands of the farmers
to emigrate. By 1920, there were well over 100,000 of these so-called
Volga and Black Sea Germans in the United States, with the greatest numbers
in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Colorado. Black Sea Germans soon became
known for their skill as wheat farmers. In 1990 an estimated one million
descendants of these Russian Germans lived in America.
1880s -
In this decade, the decade of heaviest German immigration, nearly 1.5
million Germans left their country to settle in the United States; about
250,000, the greatest number ever, arrived in 1882.
1890 - An estimated 2.8 million German-born immigrants lived in the United
States. A majority of the German-born living in the United States were
located in the "German triangle," whose three points were Cincinnati,
Milwaukee, and St. Louis.
1894 - About 800 German-language journals were being printed in the United States,
the greatest number ever. A typical newspaper was the New York Staats Zeitung.
1910 - In this year, an estimated 2.3 million German-born immigrants lived in
the United States. With declining immigration and increasing assimilation,
the number of German-language publications fell to about 550.
1920 - Roughly 1.7 million German-born immigrants lived in the United States;
the number of German-language publications fell to about 230.
1933 - The coming to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany caused a significant immigration
of leading German scientists, writers, musicians, scholars, and other
artists and intellectuals to the United States to escape persecution.
Among them were such notables as Albert Einstein, Bruno Walter, Arnold
Schoenberg, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Bethe, Thomas
Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Weil, Billy Wilder, Hannah Arendt, and Hans
Morgenthau. By the end of World War II, there were some 130,000 of these
German and Austrian refugees living in America.
1940 - An estimated 1.2 million German-born immigrants lived in the United States.
1948 - The Displaced Persons Act made general provisions for the immigration
of displaced persons in Eastern Europe, including ethnic Germans, to
the United States.
1950s - Between 1951 and 1960, 580,000 Germans immigrated to the United States.
1960s - Between 1961 and 1970, 210,000 Germans immigrated to the United States.
1970s - Between 1971 and 1980, 65,000 Germans immigrated to the United States.
1983 - The United States and Germany celebrated the German-American Tricentennial,
marking the 300th anniversary of German immigration to Pennsylvania.
1987 - German-American Day was established by Congressional resolution and presidential
proclamation.
1990 - According to the Bureau of the Census, 58 million Americans claimed to
be solely or partially of German descent. German Americans were highly
assimilated, and the use of German in the United States had declined
dramatically. Some German language newspapers continued to be published
in the United States, for example the California Staats-Zeitung.
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