Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1890-1918

Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1890-1918

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. 60 b/w photographs.