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New Citizens: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Reconstruction of Citizenship, 1865-1877

Efford, Alison Clark

Abstract Details

2008, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History.
This work explores how German immigrants influenced the reshaping of American citizenship following the Civil War and emancipation. It takes a new approach to old questions: How did African American men achieve citizenship rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? Why were those rights only inconsistently protected for over a century? German Americans had a distinctive effect on the outcome of Reconstruction because they contributed a significant number of votes to the ruling Republican Party, they remained sensitive to European events, and most of all, they were acutely conscious of their own status as new American citizens. Drawing on the rich yet largely untapped supply of German-language periodicals and correspondence in Missouri, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., I recover the debate over citizenship within the German-American public sphere and evaluate its national ramifications. Partisan, religious, and class differences colored how immigrants approached African American rights. Yet for all the divisions among German Americans, their collective response to the Revolutions of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War and German unification in 1870 and 1871 left its mark on the opportunities and disappointments of Reconstruction.
John Brooke, PhD (Committee Co-Chair)
Mitchell Snay, PhD (Committee Co-Chair)
Michael Benedict, PhD (Committee Member)
Kevin Boyle, PhD (Committee Member)
399 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Efford, A. C. (2008). New Citizens: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Reconstruction of Citizenship, 1865-1877 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1211889858

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Efford, Alison. New Citizens: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Reconstruction of Citizenship, 1865-1877. 2008. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1211889858.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Efford, Alison. "New Citizens: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Reconstruction of Citizenship, 1865-1877." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1211889858

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)