The Max Kade Institute offers a variety of virtual lectures and other presentations. Click on the links in the titles below to watch a video recording.
Translating History: The Milwaukee Pabst Family Letters (1841–1887)
Viktorija Bilić
recorded April 10, 2025
In 2005, about 350 letters dated between 1841 and 1887 were discovered at Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. They were written in the old German Kurrent script by members of the Best/Pabst family of Milwaukee brewer fame. Now, graduate students in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s German and Translation & Interpreting Studies programs are transcribing these letters and translating them into English under the guidance of Prof. Viktorija Bilić. In this presentation, Dr. Bilić will discuss different steps and challenges in the translation process. She will also share examples of the already translated letters that bring Milwaukee history to life.
Viktorija Bilić is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches courses in the German and Translation programs. Her research is focused on historical translation within the field of German American Studies.
Building Bridges: Interactions between Plain and Non-Plain Communities
Mark L. Louden
recorded March 10, 2025
As Amish, traditional Mennonite, and Hutterite (Plain) groups in North America experience exponential growth – their numbers are doubling every twenty years – interactions between Plain communities and local and state institutions are increasing. Over the past 20+ years, Mark Louden has served as an interpreter and cultural mediator for Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking Plain people, mostly in the area of healthcare, but more and more in legal cases. In this presentation, he will draw on his experience to share examples of how efforts to foster mutual understanding and respect have resulted in successful interactions between Plain communities and non-Plain professionals.
Mark L. Louden is the Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder Professor of Germanic Linguistics and the Director of the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies.
The Shared Histories of German Immigrants and African Americans in Missouri
Cecilia Nadal and Sydney Norton
recorded December 4, 2024
Within the social and political context of nineteenth-century Missouri, Sydney Norton will examine the impacts of German immigrants who were dedicated to ending slavery, and who, in some cases, worked with African Americans to institute laws of social equality after slavery was abolished. Included will be political figures, such as Friedrich Muench, Arnold Krekel, and Henry and Augustus Boernstein. Cecilia Nadal will follow with a discussion of how the story of the German abolitionists inspired her to investigate the shared history of African Americans and German Americans. After analyzing their complex and evolving historical relationships prior to, during, and following the Civil War, Nadal will share insights gleaned from discussion groups she facilitated with urban and rural Missourians from both ethnic groups. She will discuss the importance of knowing this history of relationships in our society today as well as how this history shaped the direction of her play An Amazing Story: German Abolitionists of Missouri.
Cecilia Nadal is a sociologist, playwright and community engagement professional who uses arts and history to bring diverse cultural groups together to co-create and problem-solve. For the past six years she has organized and developed symposia and local dialogue groups on the “Shared History of German Immigrants and African Americans” throughout the State of Missouri.
Sydney J. Norton is an independent scholar, translator, and educator in St. Louis, who earned her doctorate in German literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She is the editor of “Fighting for a Free Missouri: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Issue of Slavery,” a collection of essays published by the University of Missouri Press in 2023.
Foreign Traditions and Fraternal Bonds: German American Freemasons in the United States
Jesse David Chariton
recorded April 24, 2024
During the nineteenth century, German-speaking immigrants to the United States joined and formed Masonic lodges, just as they founded religious congregations, shooting clubs, and singing societies. This presentation will outline the transnational contexts of Freemasonry as a means of understanding the complex processes of Americanization. Beginning in the 1840s, American Freemasonry spread rapidly, and immigrants to the United States established lodges that operated in their own languages. An investigation into the activities of German-speaking lodges in America and their individual members provides insight into the shaping of American society.
Jesse David Chariton is a PhD student in the history department at Iowa State University. His research focuses on German and Irish immigration through the lens of religion and voluntary associations.
‘The Mysteries of New Orleans:’ Fictions and Facts in the ‘Louisiana Staats-Zeitung,’ 1854
Caroline Huey
recorded March 21, 2024
This presentation will explore the complex and conflict-ridden society experienced by German immigrants who lived in antebellum New Orleans, a port city known for its multicultural and international population as well as for being a center of slavery with dozens of slave markets. Focusing on one year, 1854, when the city’s German population had reached a peak in numbers and cultural influence, Huey juxtaposes the political editorials of a local German paper, the Louisiana Staatszeitung, with a highly popular serial melodrama published in the same paper at the same time. On page two, the news editorials covered topics of national and international importance such as citizenship, slavery, and abolition. On the front-page, Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Die Geheimnisse von New-Orleans (The Mysteries of New Orleans) detailed the lives of New Orleans German immigrants in apocalyptic and graphic detail. While the editorials promoted democracy and urged immigrants to engage politically and socially, the serial novel’s harrowing events made readers uneasy, leading them to turn inward.
Caroline Huey is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her most recent research has been about Germans in antebellum New Orleans.
Luxembourg Immigration to Southern Brazil
Carlo Krieger and Jean Ensch
recorded February 28, 2024
This video is no longer available online. Please contact apetty@wisc.edu for a special link.
In the mid-1820s, the newly independent country of Brazil invited Europeans to settle its southern lands and provide a bulwark along the borders to Argentina and Paraguay. These efforts coincided with a period of economic hardship in the rural regions of Luxembourg and neighboring German lands. Fueled by the propaganda of emigration agents, it did not take long for “Brazil fever” to set in. In 1828, after a harrowing migration experience, the first thousand Luxembourgers arrived in Brazil — a generation before the first Luxembourg settlement in the US Midwest. Since then, immigration to Brazil has continued quietly and steadily. Today 30,000 – 50,000 Brazilians are estimated to have Luxembourg ancestry. The presenters focus on the Luxembourg presence in southern Brazil today and the history of Luxembourg immigration to the region, while drawing comparisons to the experiences of Luxembourg settlers and their descendants in the United States.
Carlo Krieger holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology and is a retired Ambassador of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg who had his final posting in Brasilia, Brazil. He is President of the Roots and Leaves Association in Luxembourg and serves on the Board of Directors of the Luxembourg American Cultural Society & Center in Belgium, Wisconsin.
Jean Ensch is President of the Institut Grand Ducal (Section of linguistics, ethnology, and onomastics), a founding member of the Luxembourg Genealogical Society (ALGH), and a member of the Board of Directors of the Luxembourg American Cultural Society & Center in Belgium, Wisconsin.
German-Romance Language Contact in the Italian Alps
Stefan Rabanus
recorded December 5, 2023
Since ancient times, the Alps have been a transitional space between German(ic) and Latin/Italian cultures. This lecture will introduce the citizen science AlpiLinK project, which aims via crowdsourcing to document the Germanic and Romance dialects and minority languages and dialects spoken across the Alpine regions of Italy. The presentation will feature recordings and images from centuries-old German speech islands and the surrounding Romance dialects with which they are in contact.
Stefan Rabanus is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy. Trained at the universities of Mainz, Greifswald, and Marburg in Germany, his research interests include dialectology, history of the German language, language contact, and digital humanities.
Text Mining America’s German-Language Newspapers, 1830–1914
Jana Keck
November 15, 2023
During the era of transatlantic mass migration in the nineteenth century, texts spread extensively through the emerging German American press network. This was made possible by innovations such as the rotary press, linotype and stereotype machines, advancements in telegraphic, ship, railroad systems, as well as editors’ professional networks and the widespread custom of copying material. Which texts traveled across states and decades? This presentation focuses on the intricate system of textual exchange offering both distant and close readings of the German immigrant press. Additionally, it underscores a methodological innovation, demonstrating how newspapers, when treated as data, in conjunction with advanced computational methods, offer novel avenues for exploring digitized archives.
Jana Keck is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI). She coordinates the GHI’s research area Digital History and the institute’s project “Migrant Connections,” a digital research infrastructure for German-American History.
Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
Friederike Baer
October 17, 2023
Between 1776 and 1783, Great Britain hired more than thirty thousand German soldiers to fight in its war against the American rebels. Collectively known as Hessians, the soldiers and accompanying civilians, including hundreds of women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada in the North and West Florida in the South. This presentation highlights some of the key experiences of these participants in a war on a distant continent against a people that had done them no harm.
Friederike Baer is Associate Professor of History and Division Head for Arts and Humanities at Penn State Abington College.
‘Wo man singt:’ German American Singing Festivals, 1849–1914
Heike Bungert
April 5, 2023
This video is no longer available online. Please contact apetty@wisc.edu for a special link.
Between 1849 and 1914, German-American singing festivals with thousands of participants and visitors were a constant yet changing element in the cultural landscape of the United States. They brought German and European music to America, helped immigrants construct a German-American (musical) identity, and contributed to asserting their status in society. This presentation focuses on the beginnings and the expansion of German-American choirs, especially Männerchöre (choirs for male voices), singing federations and their festivals, and the musical repertoire that was performed from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I.
Heike Bungert is Professor for North American History at the University of Münster in Germany.
Comanches, Captives, Germans: Transactions on the Texas Frontier, 1847
Christopher J. Wickham and Daniel J. Gelo
February 9, 2023
In 2021, three finely worked sketches dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century were brought to the attention of scholars studying the relationship between German settlers and Comanche Indians. Seemingly the work of one artist, and (with one exception) never published, the drawings provide a detailed and unique view of encounters between Germans and Comanches in the Texas Hill Country. Two of them depict the dramatic transfer of a captive girl from the Comanches to the Germans. Who was the girl? Who were the Comanches involved? Who were the Germans? Where and when did this exchange take place? What do we make of the rich Indian and German cultural details that the artist includes? And, of course, who was the artist, and how important is his work? Trying to find answers to these questions, the presenters will examine the drawings in detail and decode information placed by the artist.
Christopher J. Wickham received his Ph.D. in the UW–Madison German Department. After 25 years of teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he retired in 2017.
Daniel J. Gelo, is Dean and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he taught for 31 years.
African Voices in German-Language Publications: Slave Ship Survivors in the Atlantic World, 1739–1932
Aaron Fogleman
November 10, 2022
Millions of Africans were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and scholars generally believe only a handful of publications exist that include the Africans’ own accounts of life in Africa, the Middle Passage, or life in bondage throughout the Atlantic World. Aaron Fogleman’s presentation is based on “Five Hundred African Voices,” a joint project with Robert Hanserd (Associate Professor of African and Atlantic History at Columbia College Chicago) to catalog all published accounts by Africans enslaved in the transatlantic slave trade, 1586–1936. The catalog so far covers accounts in eighteen languages of which German is the second most prominent after English. This presentation will focus on German-language publications on both sides of the Atlantic and the role of the German language and Germans themselves in publishing these works.
Aaron Spencer Fogleman is a Distinguished Research Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He has published widely on immigration, gender, race, and religion in early America and the Atlantic World.
New York’s German-Language Press in Times of Peace and War, late 19th Century to 1918
Peter Conolly-Smith
October 13, 2022
This presentation examines New York City’s thriving German-language press on the eve of World War I by looking at three representative newspapers: the bourgeois New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung, and the William Randolph Hearst-owned, yellow press-inspired New Yorker deutsches Journal. We will explore the three newspapers’ respective backgrounds, layouts, and appeal; place them within the larger context of the New York daily press (with the Yiddish-language Forverts as well as the English-language yellow press serving as points of reference and comparison); and evaluate the three newspapers’ fates during and after World War I.
Peter Conolly-Smith grew up in cold war West Berlin and now teaches late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history at the City University of New York, Queens College. He is the author of Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895-1918, Smithsonian Books (2004).
Making English Canada: German and French Bilingual Schools in Ontario, 1880–1912
Benjamin Bryce
March 8, 2022
When Anglophones and Francophones debated bilingual education in Ontario from the 1880s to the eve of the First World, they often spoke of German schools. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, German stood alongside French and English as one of three possible languages of instruction in the public and Catholic separate schools of the province. Yet starting in the 1880s, a series of cultural policies aimed to ensure that all schools in Ontario taught English, even if it was alongside French or German. With these policies, government officials and politicians increasingly sought to merge cultural and political definitions of belonging, and they embraced the idea that all citizens should share a common language. This talk presents the history of German-language education in Canada’s largest province and its slow removal (long before the First World War) while also tracing some of the origins of Canadian multiculturalism and government attempts to manage that diversity.
Benjamin Bryce is Assistant Professor of history at the University of British Columbia.
The German-American Feminist and the Rape Trial of a Yankee Abolitionist: Insights from the Letters of Mathilde Franziska Anneke
Alison Clark Efford
February 17, 2022
Alison Clark Efford explores how German-American feminist Mathilda Franziska Anneke responded to the 1859 “seduction” trial of Wisconsin’s leading abolitionist, Sherman Booth. Anneke, a Forty-Eighter and woman suffragist, was a friend and comrade of Sherman Booth, whose fame stemmed from fighting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Using evidence from Anneke’s correspondence, Dr. Efford shows that Anneke walked a fine line between seeking justice for the girl Booth raped and defending the abolitionist cause Booth represented.
Alison Clark Efford, is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University. She recently published a co-edited collection with Viktorija Bilic (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee): Radical Relationships: The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke.
How Swiss German is Amish Shwitzer?
Anja Hasse & Guido Seiler
December 9, 2021
Adams County, Indiana, is home to the Swiss Amish, a population that does do not speak Pennsylvania Dutch, but Shwitzer. The language sounds surprisingly familiar to speakers of modern Swiss-German dialects – and very different at the same time. Amish Shwitzer has preserved much of its original Bernese-Swiss-German vocabulary, but its grammatical structure has changed drastically. Rather than converging to American English, though, it has taken on elements of Pennsylvania Dutch. This presentation will examine the fascinating evolution of one of America’s unique minority languages.
Guido Seiler is a professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research specialization lies at the interface between historical and variationist linguistics and theoretical modeling of grammatical structure and language change.
Anja Hasse received her Ph.D. Germanic Linguistics and is now a postdoctoral researcher working on the “Amish Shwitzer” project. She is interested in non-standard Germanic varieties, their grammar, and contact between them.
This event has been cosponsored by the German Program in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Healing Traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch
Patrick J. Donmoyer
November 18, 2021
Exploring the cultural and historical roots of Pennsylvania Dutch healing traditions, Patrick Donmoyer introduces the customs, folkways, and rituals widely used for treating illness among humans and domesticated animals. Drawing upon his family experiences with healing traditions, as well as historical manuscripts commonly kept in family bibles and personal papers, this presentation highlights the interrelation of culturally-specific forms of medical care, with religious belief, the folk customs of the calendar year, and agricultural traditions.
Patrick J. Donmoyer is the Director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University, a folklife museum and research center on the Kutztown Campus. An avid speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch and advocate for regional folk culture, Patrick’s work blends language, cultural traditions, and vernacular architecture in his folklife research.
The German-Jewish Diaspora — From China to the US
Weijia Li
October 19, 2021
From 1938 to 1941, more than 17,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees fled from the Nazi terror to Shanghai, China. The refugees’ hope to use Shanghai as a temporary safe haven before transferring to the US or elsewhere was soon dashed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of the Pacific War. As a result, they ended up spending a decade in China before many of them immigrated to the US after the end of World War II. In this presentation, Weijia Li will examine how the German-Jewish refugee community in Shanghai thrived despite the harshness of life in exile and during the war and how its members looked forward to a new life in America.
Dr. Weijia Li is a Clinical Professor and the Director of the Global Higher Education (GHE) Master’s Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Education.
From Farm to Farmers Market: Amish Folk Society in the Age of Fast Capitalism
Simon J. Bronner
March 25, 2021
This presentation examines the twenty-first-century economic shift in Amish communities from local producers and artisans to participants in a national market system. One example is the dramatically increased presence, and in many Pennsylvania locations the domination, of Amish vendors in farmers’ markets. Although it might look as if they have changed their traditional values centered on closeness to the land, the Amish have created a special niche that mediates between the slow capitalism of a producer or communitarian farm economy and the fast capitalism of a market system in the digital age. Not motivated by profit, they have forced a re-examination of cultural factors in changing relations of the Amish to “the English” and indeed within Amish society.
Simon J. Bronner is Dean of the College of General Studies and Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The recipient of the Pennsylvania German Society’s Award of Merit, he is the co-editor of Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Johns Hopkins University Press) and contributor to Writing the Amish: The Worlds of John Hostetler (Penn State Press).
The Lives of Amish Women
Karen Johnson-Weiner
February 10, 2021
Having researched Amish life for nearly forty years, Dr. Johnson-Weiner has turned her attention to Amish women. Where much of the existing scholarship had subsumed Amish women, assuming perhaps that whatever was said about men was also true of their sisters, Dr. Johnson-Weiner explores how the sisters uniquely contribute to the communities that men and women build together.
Karen M. Johnson-Weiner is Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emerita, State University of New York at Potsdam. She is the author or co-author of several books on the Amish, including most recently The Lives of Amish Women and the forthcoming All About the Amish.
From the Spanish Royal Court to the White House: Alexander von Humboldt’s Quest for Knowledge in a World of Politics
Sandra Rebok
November 19, 2020
The year 2019 marked the 250th anniversary the birth of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian explorer, naturalist, historian and humanist, whose wide-ranging work continues to influence scientific theories and movements to this day. This lecture discusses Humboldt’s role between the declining Spanish empire and the rising American nation at the time of his visit to the United States in the spring of 1804. It analyzes the delicate balance Humboldt struck between science and politics, focusing on how he made use of the political connections offered by monarchical Spain on the one hand and Jefferson’s cabinet on the other, while the two nations, in turn, used his scientific work for their own strategic purposes. Rather than being caught between the interests of these two nations (and those of others), Humboldt created what can be called an Empire of Knowledge, an elaborate worldwide network through which he circulated information, scientific ideas, and resources.
Dr. Sandra Rebok is an internationally renowned independent historian. She worked at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and was a Marie Curie Fellow of the European Commission Research Executive Agency at the Huntington Library. Her research focuses on Alexander von Humboldt, transnational scientific collaboration in the 19th century, cultural transfers and intellectual networks, and the exploration of the American West.
Sponsors: the event is sponsored by the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies and co-sponsored by the Friends of the Max Kade Institute; the Center for German and European Studies; the Center for Culture, History, and Environment; and the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; with funding provided by the University Lectures Anonymous Fund.
“Thousands of Rhine-Hessians are Living Here” — The Southwest German Immigrant Experience in 19th Century Wisconsin
Helmut Schmahl
October 29, 2020
In the mid-nineteenth century, emigrants from the present-day German state of Rhineland-Palatinate settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in rural clusters in surrounding counties, such as Washington, Sheboygan and Fond du Lac counties. This presentation will focus on their socio-economic background, the importance of chain migration, and the acculturation that took place in Wisconsin. It will touch on agriculture and urban occupations (especially beer brewing and wine import businesses), architecture, and social life. The final part of the lecture will illustrate how some communities in the home country benefited from the support of public projects and remittances made by their former citizens who had become successful in Wisconsin.
Dr. Helmut Schmahl is a lecturer in the History Department at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, and a high school teacher of History and English. His scholarship focuses on German immigration to North America, particularly emigration from Southwest Germany.
Faithful to the Fatherland or Doughboys of Deutsch? New Perspectives on the World War I Experience
Walter D. Kamphoefner
October 1, 2020
This lecture examines the experiences of German Americans during the Great War, focusing on their treatment by the Anglo-American society as well as their own attitudes toward the war and the Fatherland. Both groups failed to distinguish between political loyalty on the one hand, and cultural loyalty and language preservation on the other. Whereas many civilian institutions in America were highly intolerant and discriminatory toward ethnic Germans, the U.S. Army was more accepting and practiced ethnic pluralism in its ranks. This is reflected in the many letters written home in the German language by U.S. soldiers, many of which were subsequently published in German-American newspapers. Some who paid the ultimate sacrifice are commemorated on gravestones with German inscriptions in American cemeteries.
Walter D. Kamphoefner is Professor of History at Texas A&M University, focusing on immigration history and the U.S. Civil War and publishing in the field of immigration and ethnicity. His forthcoming book, Germans in America: A Concise History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), surveys the German-American experience over three centuries.