David A. Gerber

Cutting Out Shylock: Elite Anti-Semitism and the Quest for Moral Order in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Market Place

The nineteenth-century northern city was increasingly a society of strangers, who were learning, from the perspectives of dozens of ethnic cultures, to live with one another, while at the same time having to come to terms with everaccelerating urban growth and economic development. That much is certainly well known. But the relationships among these processes of change, as they were interpreted in the lived experience of contemporaries, are less well known. To some extent this is the case because the complex ways in which values appropriate to the emerging social order were created continue to need explanation. This essay argues that a significant relationship exists between two problems in our historiography that have not yet been juxtaposed. If brought together, however, these problems may well illuminate an aspect of the reorientation of values at one social level in the mid-nineteenth century. The two problems are the social functions of American anti-Semitism and the cultural changes prompted by the antebellum expansion of commercial capitalism, which dramatically increased the scope and scale of markets. In particular, we are interested here in the relation between the antiSemitism of American Protestant elites and the evolution of perceptions underlying standards of ethical (and unethical) business behavior. While the origins of American anti-Semitism remain obscure, the formative period of American hostility to Jews has recently, if tentatively, been pushed further back into the early nineteenth century, after years of scholarly concentration on the Populist-Progressive period. 1 It is wholly appropriate, then, that an ef-

The Pathos of Exile: Old Lutheran Refugees in the United States and South Australia

Beginning in 1613, when the Prussian royal family converted to Calvinism while the vast majority of its subjects remained part of the state-regulated Lutheran church, the Hohenzollern kings found themselves living with an anomalous religious situation. Royal discontent with this circumstance had always existed, but efforts to bring about a change failed until, in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, Frederick William III resolved to take decisive action. A pious man and conscientious theologian, the king was deeply troubled by the continuing existence among large numbers of his subjects of rationalism and religious indifferentism, legacies of the Enlightenment. Moreover, reflecting on the defeat of Prussia by the French in 1806, he was also committed to national regeneration, which seemed blocked not only by the lack of religiosity he perceived, but by the disunity inherent in the religious gulf which separated Reformed monarch and Lutheran subject. In 1817, with the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in mind, he proclaimed the intention to merge the Reformed and Lutheran churches of Prussia, and proceeded actively to involve himself in framing a common agenda for the doctrine of the new church. Serving God and the state in one bold stroke, the king was doubtless proud of the decision, and the large majority of his Lutheran subjects and their pastors unquestioningly accepted it. But for a minority of his subjects, eventually known as Old Lutherans because of their desire to preserve the doctrinal purity of the Lutheran Confessions, the union was a severe challenge to conscience and ultimately a tragedy. It drove them into reluctant disobedience to their king, and finally into exile in the United States (largely in Buffalo and nearby Niagara County, and to a lesser extent around Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and in South Australia. In doing so, the union set in motion decades of painful readjustment. Though the

In Search of Al Schmid: War Hero, Blinded Veteran, Everyman

During an intense firefight at the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, Marine Private Al Schmid, a Philadelphia metal worker, shared a machine gun emplacement with two other young Marines: Johnny Rivers, a Native-American from rural Pennsylvania, and Lee Diamond, a Jew from Brooklyn. During many hours of night combat, as wave after wave of Japanese tried unsuccessfully to cross the Tenaru and overwhelm the thin line of American defenders, first Rivers was shot and instantly killed, and then Diamond was severely wounded. Furious over the death of his friend and fighting for his life, Schmid continued to try to ward off the enemy. Toward the end of the battle, which was to prove decisive for securing Guadalcanal, he was wounded by a grenade fragment. One of his eyes was immediately destroyed and the other was greatly damaged. Now sightless, Schmid continued, with what little aid the barely conscious Diamond could provide, to fire the machine gun. Eventually he was credited with killing two hundred Japanese before his position was relieved in the morning. Schmid spent much of the next two years in military hospitals, where unsuccessful efforts were made to save what little sight remained to him, and where he began the process of blind rehabilitation.

Ethnic identification and the project of individual identity: The life of Mary Ann wodrow Archbald (1768–1840) of little cumbrae island, Scotland and Auriesville, New York

A totalizing and privileging of ethnicity, to the exclusion of other sources of identification, in American historiography has created a tendency to conflate group identity and individual identity in historical subjects. While ethnic group identities are ultimately rooted in cultural representations and ideologies, individual (or personal) identity is the ongoing effort to maintain a sense of continuity. Personal identity assures us we remain the same person that we have been previously. The letters of a Scottish immigrant to the United States are examined to suggest the role of ethnicity in personal identity.

Moving backward and moving on: nostalgia, significant others, and social reintegration in nineteenth-century British immigrant personal correspondence

Abstract Nostalgia among immigrants frequently has been conceived of as a brooding and obsessive homesickness that leads to depression, lassitude, and neurotic misery among those who have left their original home and resettled elsewhere. Recent social psychological, literary and philosophical work, however, has sought a reformulation of nostalgia that instead emphasizes the positive uses to which memory, even painful memory, may be put in the effort to confront the challenges to personal identities of such massive changes in the lives of an individual as immigration. Through exploration of the letters to family members of three British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century, this essay seeks to demonstrate how symbolic representations of the personal past inscribed creatively in letter-writing may function, or alternatively fail to function, to provide associations that bridge the gaps between past and present. The past may serve up mental images of pleasant circumstances involving people, places and events that serve as metaphoric building blocks by which the mind may ultimately place the individual in new circumstances, now made more familiar by virtue of their comparability to the past. Or, the tendency toward nostalgic memory may simply be overtaken by immersion in new circumstances that work in time to lead individuals realistically to draw pleasure from the past, while understanding its declining day-to-day relevance.