Imagining a New Volk: German-American Nationalism in the Age of the Revolution

German colonists who participated in the American Revolution did so in a number of ways that were comparable to their Anglo-American neighbors. Yet German Patriots also had a unique method of expressing American nationalism: their vocabulary. While using the German language in the New World was often a means of preserving identity and cultural institutions, it also provided an avenue through which they could assert a hybrid German-American identity: the word Volk. This paper focuses primarily on the changes in the writings of Henry Miller, the foremost German-American who cast his lot with the Patriot cause. It tracks a shift in his use of language during the American Revolution and demonstrates how he used the concept of Volk first to assert a distinct colonial identity and later to invent an America nation for German consumption.

A European Turn in Early American History?

From the nineteenth century onwards, Americans have naturalized their colonial origins into a consensual nationalist history, emphasizing America’s perceived role as a refuge for the persecuted, while smoothing out a myriad of complexities in the process. Evan Haefeli attempts to overturn the assumptions underpinning this narrative and is convinced that many important aspects of early America need to be understood within a broader European context. In Accidental Pluralism, he argues that the collapse of religious unity in England lies at the root of the emergence of pluralism in colonial America, in which he includes Canada and the Caribbean. Relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the earliest decades of colonization and created a pluralistic religious landscape that no one had anticipated. The four reviewers are fulsome in their praise, calling it an impressive, important, powerful, and sweeping book that few scholars could have written. The reviewers also raise questions, for instance by problematizing the incorporation of the colonial American dimension into early British history, criticizing the validity of the chosen end date, and questioning his definitions of diversity, pluralism, and religious toleration. In his response Evan Haefeli takes the opportunity to reflect on what drove him to write the book and to organize it in this way. He acknowledges that connecting early American history with its broader European context was more difficult than it should have been, as the dominant questions in the two historiographies are an ocean apart. While the argument of the book is aimed at early Americanists, Haefeli is grateful that the reviewers situate the story he tells within the broader early modern European history of toleration.