This research will examine two books on immigration to the American Midwest in the nineteenth century: Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860, by Kathleen Neils Conzen, and Ethnicity on Parade, by April R. Schultz. The plan of the research will be to discuss both works with reference to the means by which dominant themes are developed, including the respective authors' use of primary sources.
Conzen's Immigrant Milwaukee focuses principally on the dramatic influx of German immigrants to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 25 years before the Civil War. The book is basically a chronicle of the development of a German community within a city that was itself being created, having been founded in 1826. The coping strategies that German immigrants engaged in to assure their economic survival and their identity as an ethnic community were part of a process of acculturation and assimilation into the dominant Anglo-American culture of the US, including active participation in the American political process. Irish immigration to Milwaukee was taking place at roughly the same time, in the wake of the potato famine in Ireland. Although the book's principal focus is on German immigrants, it identifies ethnic distribution and mixing of neighborhoods of Anglo-Americans, Irish, and Germans as part of a gradual Americanization of the entire community.
Ethnicity on Parade is structured primarily with reference to a single event that was organized to highlight the development of Norwegian immigrants to America. Focusing on the Pageant of the Northmen presented in Minneapolis in 1925 as part of the Norse-American Centennial Celebration and Exposition , to celebrate 100 years of documented Norwegian immigrant presence in America, Ethnicity on Parade analyzes the symbolic significance of the pageant as an index of the degree and kind of acculturation of Norwegian-Americans that had taken place over the course of the previous century. Schultz takes the view that the...