Co-Sonsored by Merchant’s House Museum

In 1880, New York City was the third-largest German-speaking city in the world, with half of its 1.2 million residents German-born and their American-born children. These Germans and German-Americans clustered in Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), now called the Lower East Side, where over the course of two generations they had built the United States’ first neighborhood defined by ethnicity.

In 1920, Germans were still the second largest ethnic group in the city, but the institutions and social activities that had made the German community so visible for so many decades had largely disappeared. Where did all the Germans go? How does a community of several hundred thousand people become invisible within a generation?

Historian Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson will discuss her book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2021), which analyzes the assimilation of one of New York City’s largest immigrant communities in the early 20th century. She will also discuss what the German example can tell us about ethnic and national identities, assimilation, pluralism, and the dynamics of immigrant communities in New York City.

Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2000) and focuses on the history of migration, immigrant communities, assimilation-pluralism theory, and maritime history. She is the author of four books and several articles and has curated several museum exhibitions dealing with migration history. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship to Germany in 2014 and was a visiting scholar at the German Maritime Museum/Leibniz Institute for Maritime History in 2016. A native of California, she lived in Hoboken from 2005 until 2014 and has lived in Bremen, Germany since 2017.