United States Of German America:---

[MastanKhan]

Just check this out---:

 

[TruthSeeker]

My great-great grandfather immigrated from Germany to become a farmer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the 1840's. He was thrown in jail by the Union Army during the US Civil War for providing food to Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Poor guy, he was just a German farmer trying to make a life in the New World. Fortunately one of his daughters, my great grandmother, had my grand mother, who had my mother so I now exist.

 

[zectech]

Really sad part of history

During World War I, U.S. Government Propaganda Erased German Culture

April 7, 20176:00 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Robert Siegel

Art Silverman

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This week marks the centennial of U.S. entry into World War I, a conflict that shattered empires and cost millions of lives. On the American home front, it made this country less culturally German.

Today, when the question of loyalty of immigrants has again become contentious, what happened a century ago has special relevance. World War I inspired an outbreak of nativism and xenophobia that targeted German immigrants, Americans of German descent and even the German language.

German-born Robert Prager was lynched in Collinsville, Ill., in 1918. Some Germans and German-Americans were attacked during World War I.

Courtesy of Jeffrey Manuel
It was a remarkable reversal of fortune. Germans were the largest non-English-speaking minority group in the U.S. at the time. The 1910 census counted more than 8 million first- and second-generation German-Americans in the population of 92 million.

There were still more German-American families that had been in the country longer, many since Colonial times. They were Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Mennonites, Jews and free thinkers of no religion at all.

"During the 1850s, 900,000 — almost a million — Germans went to the United States," says historian Kenneth Ledford of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "That's at a time when the German population was only about 40 million."

German-Americans often worshipped in churches where German was used. They could live on city streets or in towns with German names. And while many immigrants assimilated into the English-speaking mainstream, many others sent their children to German-language public schools.

Ledford says cities such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago gave parents the option for their children in elementary school to receive their instruction in German as well as in English.

"German was the lingua franca of the literary scene, of the entertainment scene, of the theaters," says Richard Schade of the University of Cincinnati. He says many cities were also home to German-language newspapers and clubs where German was spoken.

Inside The Vacant Caverns Of St. Louis' Other Beer Baron
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The social life of the community was lubricated with the beverage Germans brought from the old country. Lager beer was drunk cold in beer halls. Beer put Germans on a collision course with the growing temperance movement. But the biggest collision ahead was over language. Before World War I, German wasn't just an ethnic minority language; it was the most studied modern foreign language in America.

Legal historian Paul Finkelman says in 1915 about 25 percent of all high school students in America studied German. But by the end of the World War I that had changed dramatically. German had become so stigmatized that only 1 percent of high schools even taught it.

"During the war, there is an argument that if you learn German, you will become the 'Hun,' " Finkelman says, using the pejorative term for anyone from Germany. "And there was this notion that language was somehow organic to your soul. So if you spoke German, you would think like a German, you would become a totalitarian in favor of the kaiser."


Parallels
From Wristwatches To Radio, How World War I Ushered In The Modern World
For the first three years of the war, the American people were divided over getting involved. When members of minority groups spoke against entering the war in support of Britain, including some, but not all German-Americans, their patriotism was questioned. They were disparaged as "hyphenated Americans."

After President Woodrow Wilson took the country into war he said, "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him, carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic when he gets ready."

Schade says this anti-German sentiment extended to internment.

"Hans Kuhnwald, the concertmeister of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was interned; the German language was forbidden; the German-American press was heavily censored; libraries had to pull German books off the shelves; German-American organizations were targeted," Schade says, "and what happened, of course, is the German-Americans considered themselves to be good Americans of German extraction, several generations removed from the old country."


History
The Unsung Equestrian Heroes Of World War I And The Plot To Poison Them
The demonization of German-Americans took its ugliest turn in Collinsville, Ill., which is now a suburb of St. Louis. On April 4, 1918, a German immigrant, Robert Prager, was lynched.

Robert Stevens, vice president of the historical museum in Collinsville, says Prager's nationality wasn't the only thing that led to his murder. He was a socialist who worked at a local coal mine, and he was on the wrong side of the miners union. But that April night, Prager got on the wrong side of a drunken mob that accused him of spying for Imperial Germany.

"They stripped him totally naked, and they put a rope around his neck, and they paraded him down Main Street, making him sing patriotic songs," Stevens says. "And they would take their beer bottles and break them in front of him. So he had to step on the broken beer bottles, cut his feet really badly."

Lynching Of Robert Prager Underlined Anti-German Sentiment During World War I
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Prager professed his love for America and kissed the flag that his tormentors wrapped him in. Even so, he was taken to the edge of town to a hanging tree.

"The group lowered him down quickly and, you know, break his neck," Stevens says. "They hollered, 'once for the red,' and they lowered him again, 'once for the white' and 'once for the blue.' "

Pete Stehman, who grew up in Collinsville, says the townspeople didn't talk about Prager for decades, but over the years he became fascinated with the mob's crime and the town's silence. He has written a book about it.

He says that when 11 men were put on trial for the lynching, they were all acquitted. And he points out that the local newspaper wrote about the verdict.


Parallels
At A Hefty Cost, World War I Made The U.S. A Major Military Power
"The community is well convinced he was disloyal," the newspaper article read. "The city does not miss him. The lesson of his death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation."

Years later, in his memoir, the editor who wrote that article would call the trial "a farcical patriotic orgy."

While historians differ on what effect this had on German-Americans, Frederick Luebke, author of Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I, says "a few reacted by asserting their Germanness with new vigor." But he adds, "others sought to slough off their ethnicity as painlessly as possible."

In the anti-German hysteria of World War I, the assimilation of German-Americans was accelerated. And being a hyphenated American would mean being suspect in nativist eyes for decades to come.


The Germans were the good guys in WWI, and were vilified for being German by false flaggers in Washington and London.

The British-Washington alliance went onto vilifying Russians, Muslims and now the Chinese. Same group doing the same thing.

 

[CrazyZ]

Genetic archaeology has determined that a large group of settlers originating from Anatolia migrated to central Europe about 7,500 years ago. This is how farming spread to Europe from the middle east. Almost all Europeans have some genetic linkage to these migrants. I guess the migration would continue to North America. Modern concepts of borders and cultures are artificial constructs.

 

[Mangus Ortus Novem]

 

[Kamikaze Pilot]

My great-great grandfather immigrated from Germany to become a farmer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the 1840's. He was thrown in jail by the Union Army during the US Civil War for providing food to Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Poor guy, he was just a German farmer trying to make a life in the New World. Fortunately one of his daughters, my great grandmother, had my grand mother, who had my mother so I now exist.

Is the story authentic?

- PRTP GWD

 

[313ghazi]

Do any of you guys have Amazon Prime?

The man in the high castle is an excellent drama.

 

[Mentee]

 

[TruthSeeker]

Is the story authentic?

- PRTP GWD

Of course it is authentic. I am 74 years old now, born in Virginia in 1945. My mother, the youngest of her siblings, was born in 1914 in Arlington, Virginia to my grandmother who was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1880 to my great grandmother, who was born in 1849 on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to my immigrant German great-great grandfather who had arrived in the USA from Germany around 1842. The Union Army under Gen. Phillip Sheridan moved north to south down the length of the Shenandoah Valley in late 1864, destroying all of the farms to deny Robert E. Lee supplies he was actually taking from the mostly immigrant farmers who operated small one-family farms in the Valley. My great grandmother was the oldest child, about fifteen years old at the time. She told the story to my Grandmother that the "Yankees" took her father to jail in Fredericksburg for the crime of providing supplies to the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Her mother, my great-great grandmother, went to Fredericksburg and pleaded that they let her German husband, who had no part in slaves or the "rebellion", go. Fortunately he was released as a non-combatant and survived the war. My father's side of my family immigrated from Scotland in the 1870's, settling in Missouri. My mother and father met in Arlington, Virginia before World War II after my father's immediate family moved from Missouri to the Washington, D.C. area to find work during the US Economic Depression of the 1930's.

 

[MastanKhan]