Migrant Knowledge

Migrant Knowledge

Category: Series: What Did They Know

Looks at travelogues and guidebooks available in two Baden libraries in the 1890s to determine the knowledge of the USA, and particularly of American women, presented therein.

‘Plant-like Women and Luxury Wives’—American Women in Nineteenth-century German Travelogues and Guides

Marie Nella Hoffmann

Analyzes the content of a collection of letters from a Baden emigrant to America to determine the knowledge he shared back home.

Rübelmann’s Letters: Knowledge Transfer through Emigrant Correspondence

Hannah Laubrock

Analyzes the knowledge of America presented in the popular late 19th-c. German magazines Die Gartenlaube and Deutscher Hausschatz.

Through the Information Jungle Towards the ‘Land of Freedom’: Images of ‘America’ in German Magazines in the 1870s and 1880s

Luca Leitz-Schwoerer

Compares two textbooks for schoolchildren in Baden in the late nineteenth century and presents the ideas they conveyed about the US.

A Cautionary Tale: Baden’s Late Nineteenth-Century Textbooks and Their Portrayal of America

Marie Nella Hoffmann

Introduces a 6-part miniseries analyzing 6 sources of knowledge of the US for prospective migrants in Baden in the late 19th century.

What Did They Know?: An Introduction to the Miniseries