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

by Conolly Smith P, Peter Conolly-Smith

Focusing on the three most significant German immigrant newspapers published in New York, Conolly-Smith (history, Union County College, New Jersey) explores how the images in the periodicals encouraged German immigrants to participate in the emerging forms of popular culture, and thus hastened their identification as Americans rather than Germans. The study is revised from his 1996 doctoral dissertation for Yale University. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2004

Reviews

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an invaluable source on the German American community in New York City and the German-language press. I found it odd, however, that Conolly-Smith has so little to say about Jewish Germans in New York in the nineteenth century. If you read his book side-by-side with Stephen Birmingham's *Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York*, for example (as I am currently doing), you feel as though Birmingham and Conolly-Smith are describing two totally different cities, even though they are both writing about New York-- and the German American community in that city during the same time period. The two books were written decades apart, but I wish the two writers could have collaborated on a single book. It seems that each book is incomplete without considering the point of view explored by the other.