Hopeful Journeys Reveiw

This book, Hopeful Journeys, is very well written. It offers incite into the lives of the German immigrant. It beings you into the lives of these immigrants, has the reader feeling like they are a part of this group. The main thesis of this book is about how the German immigrants used a collective strategy; they collectively linked their lives from their homeland into America. The author is trying to show that they freely left Germany and that they were not victims at all. These German immigrants adapted, they assimilated to a point and they found a balance. Aaron Fogleman asks the main question of did these German immigrants adapt to American culture? Or was it the opposite, did the American people adapt into the ways of these immigrants? This is stated in the introduction and the rest of the book goes on to give an answer.

The push/pull factor of the German immigrants was that of land, religious persecution and violence (wars). They fled Germany because of the violence and the persecution but they choose to come to America because they heard that there was an abundance of land. They risked everything; they took chances to start a new life in a new place to be able to be free and have land. These immigrants were transplanted because they did not have that hard of a time settling in. They were able to get jobs right away and able to situate themselves to begin a new chapter in their lives. "The immigrants' Old World customs, beliefs, and connections did not entirely disappear as they adapted to life in the colonies; instead the Germans' past ways helped shape behavior in the new world" (back cover). This explains how the Germans were able to assimilate themselves in America. It explains how they were transplanted and not uprooted because they did not completely loose their identity. They were able to use their traditions and beliefs to assimilate. They used their community as a sense of having a network, community helped them to adjust. The issues of race, class and religion all had an impact upon the experience of the German immigrants. Race (ethnicity) and class played a role into where they would settle and whom they settled with. They played a role because even though they all came from the same country, they still had issues from their home villages and even though the Germans migrated in such large clusters they tended to settle in smaller groups of the same interests. For example German Catholics settled in one area and German Lutherans settled in another. Fogleman wants the reader to understand the sense of community, how the Germans created a bond and stuck together. Religion gave the immigrants a sense of unity, community ties. The German immigrant's mobility was very low and this made the Germans stable which helped them to assimilate more rapidly. Their stability showed a sign of success, and the fact that they were building new roots.

Aaron Fogleman focuses on one particular group, The Moravians. He calls them radical pietists because they put an emphasis on religious practices and stressed devotion. They embraced the concept of reforming. For the Moravians, their religion was a driving factor as to why they came to America (Pennsylvania). They wanted to be able to missionize outside of Germany. The Moravians lived near other Germans but not with them. This was a tactic to try to missionize these other Germans into their own religion, but they were not aggressive about it, they wanted others to want to join their group freely, on their own terms.

Fogleman