Germans are the largest ancestral group in Michigan, representing over 2.6 million descendants or 22% of the state’s population. Yet, unlike other immigrant groups, Germans have not retained their linguistic and cultural traditions as part of a distinct ethnic identity. The Bavarian villages of Frankenmuth and Gaylord stand as testaments to the once proud and vigorous German communities that dotted both rural and urban Michigan landscapes. Jeremy W. Kilar explores the social forces that transformed Germans from inward-looking immigrants to citizens in the cultural mainstream. Germans in Michigan is a story of assimilation and renewal and as such reveals the complexities of Americanization and immigration as social forces.
The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish." After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact.
This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and "peoplehood" helped them resist and eventually defeat the U.S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.
The youngest of a large Norwegian immigrant family, Gudrun Thue Sandvold was known for her beaming blue eyes and a reserve that gave way to laughter whenever she got together with her sisters. She took immeasurable pride in her children and grandchildren, kept an exquisite home, and turned the most mundane occasion into a party. And to all who knew her, Gudrun’s cooking was the stuff of legend.
Part cookbook, part immigrant story, and part family memoir, Gudrun's Kitchen features hundreds of Gudrun Sandvold’s recipes for comfort food from a time when families and friends gathered at the table and connected with one another every single day. But this book is much more than a guide to Norwegian culinary traditions; it is an important contribution to immigrant history and a vital documentation of our nation’s multicultural heritage.
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