German-American Religious and Ethnic Bridges: The Rhetoric of German Readers for Catholic Schools in the United States (1870-1910)
German-American Religious and Ethnic Bridges: The Rhetoric of German Readers for Catholic Schools in the United States (1870-1910)

Summary/Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century, the German Americans, one of the largest immigrant groups at the time, were actively involved in the process of re-negotiating their linguistic and ethnic identities in the American environment. Consequently, particularly after 1850, they started setting up German-language schools in order to maintain their language and cultural heritage. Between 1870 and 1910, the Catholic schools for Germans in the United States used textbooks/readers in German to help their students to acculturate successfully to the American mainstream, while also maintaining their ethnic, linguistic and religious ties. This essay explores the ways in which the secular and religious information in a set of four fourth-level Catholic readers/textbooks reflects issues related both to the German Catholic education and to the Americanization trend at the turn into the twentieth century, from a synchronic perspective, as same-level readers, and from a diachronic one, by looking at their progression in time - 1870, 1874, 1897, and 1910.

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