Synopses & Reviews
At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life.
But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans.
Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?
Synopsis
How New York's immigrants assimilated to American life through their love of popular culture. Translating America focuses on one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into American culture? And, how does American culture change with the their arrival? In 1910 more than 600,000 Germans were listed in the New York City census, yet 50 years later social scientists were hard-pressed to find a trace of German culture. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated. In Translating America Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis: that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. German culture did not disappear overnight; rather it merged with new forms of American popular culture: dance halls, vaudeville, nickelodeons, the films of D.W. Griffith, the music of John Philip Sousa, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, and even baseball games all helped German immigrants to assimilate and become German-Americans.
About the Author
Peter Conolly-Smith holds a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. He is an assistant professor of history at Union County College in New Jersey and lives in New York City.