Introduction: Something We Weren’t Supposed to Know or Hear
Chapter One: Recovering Immigration History and the Role of
Narrative
Chapter Two: Contexts of German Immigration, German Schooling and
Anti-German Sentiment
Chapter Three: Origin Stories: Chronicles of Family Genesis,
Citizenship and Belonging
Chapter Four: Narrating Americanization, Anti-German Sentiment and
Language LossChapter Five: “It’s not like an old family affair”:
Narratives of New Immigrants and New Immigration
Chapter Six: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Making Sense of
Americanization Stories
Maris R. Thompson is associate professor of education at California State University, Chico.
Thompson (education, California State Univ., Chico) draws on
scholarship from linguistic anthropology, education, history, and
psychology to analyze her interviews with 35 German Americans (ages
61–95) from two rural Midwestern counties about their early lives.
She asked her subjects about their families of origin and ethnic
and linguistic identity, and how their own origin narratives
influence their views about current immigration from Latin America.
The 1918 mob lynching of Robert Prager, a young German immigrant
accused of having socialist beliefs, in Collinsville, Illinois,
thirty miles from the communities of Thompson's study, serves as
the poignant opening of the brief historical overview, which
explains the dramatic cultural losses as a result of involuntary
linguistic and cultural assimilation. As the granddaughter of a
German American from Clinton County (the locale of her study),
Thompson had unique access to her subjects. She uses her position
as both insider and outsider to understand the connections between
past anti-German hysteria and hostility against immigrants today.
She offers an effective critique of the “monolingual paradigm” in
American schools and calls for more “intergenerational
transmission.” Based on the author's PhD dissertation in education,
this study will be an important resource in a wide range of
disciplines.
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and
above.
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