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 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. Recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates and above.
*Choice Reviews*
Scholars interested in how German Americans experienced anti-German
hostility in the United States during the world wars will find that
Maris R. Thompson’s deeply researched book, Narratives of
Immigration and Language Loss, persuasively argues for using
narrative to analyze the early twentieth-century history of German
Americans, who in 1914 constituted the largest non-English speaking
immigrant group in the United States. Drawing on theories of
linguistic anthropology, methods of narrative analysis, and
ethnographic studies, Thompson demonstrates how narratives about
anti-German sentiment shed light on central elements of the
Americanization process: the discrimination and language loss that
disrupted this ethnic group’s communities and silenced oral
transmission of their experiences to subsequent generations.
*Indiana Magazine of History*
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