On Little Germany

This is a decent study about German New York in the mid nineteenth century. The real strength of this book is Nadel’s examination of Germans as a collection of peoples from different states and different cultural backgrounds (it ends only 9 years after the unification of Germany). Germans were often defined more by their religion or region in the United States than a sense of German-ness as such, given that Germany unified only a decade before the end of the period at hand. It also does a nice job of emphasizing the importance of German socialism in pulling Samuel Gompers’s (who was a German New Yorker) AFL a bit further to the left.