History of German part 1

The history of German Americans began in 1608, when German immigrants began to settle in the United States, in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. They began to arrive in significant numbers in 1680, establishing small, tightly-knit communities in New York and Pennsylvania. Immigration of Germans to America increased after that, experiencing its greatest boom between 1840 and 1900. Like immigrants from other nations, Germans came to America seeking new opportunities and freedoms that didn’t exist in the old European world. They have influenced nearly every facet of American society, from science and industry to entertainment and sports. As a result of the long and interesting history of German Americans, they are the largest self-reported ancestry group in the United States.

The first German Americans arrived in the Jamestown Settlement aboard the Mary and Margaret, an English ship that came into port on October 1, 1608. They were the forerunners of a group of nearly 70 German immigrants who were relocating to the colony, which at that time consisted of a large wooden fort on a peninsula of the James River. Wilhelm Waldi, known to the English settlers as William Volday, worked with Christopher Newport to search for precious metals around the Jamestown colony, but their mission was unsuccessful. Germantown, Pennsylvania, the first exclusively German settlement in the history of German Americans, was founded on October 6, 1683.

German immigration during the eighteenth century was driven ahead by push factors”such as religious persecution, the military draft, and diminishing opportunities for German farmers”as well as pull factors”the greater availability of farmland in the Americas, and greater economic opportunity. The largest immigration of this period in the history of German Americans, known as the Palatine immigration, consisted of 2,100 Protestant Germans from the Palatine region of Germany who settled in New York’s Mohawk valley in 1710. Many Germans came to America as indentured servants as well, settling primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. In 17775, the German American population constituted one third of the people in Pennsylvania.

Six million Germans immigrated to the US in the period between 1848 and the First World War, making it the heaviest period of German immigration in the history of German Americans. In 1848, revolutions in German states drove political refugees to the United States, a group that was later called the Forty-Eighters. German immigrants of the nineteenth century settled in Detroit, Chicago, and New York, as well as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Hoboken, and Cincinnati. While half settled in large cities, the other half headed for farms in the Midwest, where German Americans became a staple of rural American life. They also settled in Texas and the Dakotas. Many German immigrants volunteered to fight for the Union during the American Civil War, and even engaged in protests against slavery, effectively ending slave auctions in St. Louis. This led to tension and conflicts for German Americans who lived in heavily Confederate areas, such as Texas.