In Trade Unions and Community Dorothee Schneider argues that German unions played a vital role in building community for German immigrants in North America. More than other organizations such as churches or regional groups, Schneider maintains, trade unions were in the best position to build community in a new, rapidly changing industrial society.Why were the unions so well suited to the development of the German-American working class and its integration into North American society and politics? What was the effect of the trade unions' central role on the community as a whole? Did these unions carry their community-building role into the American trade union movement in general? To answer these questions, Schneider focuses on German-American skilled workers, portraying a group of immigrants who brought from Europe not just their pre-industrial traditions but also a wealth of experience in industrialized settings and a diverse political culture.Examining bakers, brewery workers, and cigar makers, she highlights the origins of the political culture of the American immigrant working class in a new way. Schneider argues that, in spite of the contradictory interests of traditionalists, political progressives, and assimilationists, German-American workers favored a centralized craft unionism and thus became backers of Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor.

Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in New York City, 1870-1900 (Working Class in American History)

Schneider, Dorothée

History

University of Illinois Press

Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans―in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants’ experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers’ debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses.
Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. While officials argued over immigrants’ fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies.
Schneider aims to relate the immigrant experience as a totality across many borders. By including immigrant voices as well as U.S. policies and laws, she provides a truly transnational history that offers valuable perspectives on current debates over immigration.

Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States

Americas

Harvard University Press

This collection of memoirs by refugees from Nazi Germany is a rich source of autobiographical information on the Nazi era. Housed at Houghton Library of Harvard University, it consists of 263 files containing the memoirs of approximately 230 people who lived in Germany or Austria during the 1930s. The stories of the memoirists encompass an almost bewildering range of human experience. The authors come from Danzig and Berlin, from central Germany and the Southwest, from Munich and from Vienna. They are Jews and Catholics and Protestants, and mixtures of these all-too-neat categories in their origins and marriages. They are peddlers and professors, machinists and lawyers, private housewives and public activists. They are conservatives and liberals and Communists. The strongest common bond was their exile.

My Life in Germany Before and after January 30, 1933: A Guide to a Manuscript Collection at Houghton Library Transactions, American Philosophical ... of the American Philosophical Society)

Biographies & Memoirs

Liebersohn, Harry

Community & Culture

The American Philosophical Society Press

Die Welt in seinem Kopf: Über das Lernverhalten von Hunden

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Pets & Animal Care

Animal Learn Verlag

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