Since the Pennsylvania-German broadsides featured in this book are for the most part in the German language, it is necessary to look at the German vocabulary of the broadside. The commonest German word for broadside is Flugblatt, which my old standard Cassell dictionary defines as “pamphlet, broadsheet, handbill,” which is correct if one omits the word “pamphlet.” The prefix Flug means “flying,” and Blatt means “sheet” or “leaf.” The plural, fliegende Blätter, amusingly suggests leaves flying through the air in all directions, just as polemical broadsides did figuratively “fly” in the Renaissance/Reformation period. These words are of course similar and related to the English synonym “flyer,” mentioned above. Finally there is the plain, no-nonsense German definition of broadside as Einblattdruck—literally, a sheet or leaf of paper printed on one side. The Danish spin-off of this cumbersome German word is Etbladstryck, literally, “one-sheet-print.” According to the Laurits Bødker dictionary of folk literature, the definition is “a single, usually illustrated leaf printed on one side only, containing all sorts of announcements for Christian edification, historical, often sensational news, reports of strange events, and various forms of folk literature.” Similar terms entered the other Scandinavian languages, undoubtedly via German scholarship.

In defining the terms Flugblatt and Flugschrift in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Rolf Wilhelm Brednich of the University of Göttingen enlightens us as follows: “By the term Flugblatt is understood an unfolded sheet printed with lettering or a graphic design (woodcut, copperplate engraving, or etching), or a combination of both types.” He informs us also that the word is a relatively late coinage in German. It first appeared in 1787 as a translation of the somewhat earlier French term feuille volante. A Flugschrift, on the other hand, is a paper-covered pamphlet or small book made by folding one or more folio sheets printed on both sides. For our use the term Flugblatt is best translated as “broadside,” and Flugschrift as “pamphlet” or “chapbook.” Both are classic examples of printed wares, peddled and sold at markets and fairs, that can be called “street literature.”

According to Professor Brednich, the Flugschrift is a product of printing that spread enormously in consequence of the Protestant Reformation. These early pamphlets were “independent, non-periodical, and bound in paper.” Their main purpose was to present information on the political and religious questions of the day. But soon new themes were added, addressed to a broader readership. In folk-cultural research many of these early booklets can be considered Volksbücher—“folk books” or books directed to a popular audience, i.e., chapbooks hawked on the streets, at markets and fairs, or carried about by “chapmen” or colporteurs.

A large number of the sixteenth-century chapbooks presented song material, either Geistliche Lieder (spiritual songs) enjoyed by the pious outside the church services, or Weltliche Lieder (worldly songs) whose subject matter ranged from tragic ballads to comic and erotic verse. Song pamphlets remained popular long after their first appearance in print. For example, the German Folksong Archive at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau has a collection of at least ten thousand originals or copies of song chapbooks from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

The commonest title printed on the German broadside during its first century of development was Newe Zeitung—which can be translated “New Tidings” or “News Report.” “News” was appropriate since many broadsides told of recent events, wars, battles, tragedies, and wonders. There were as yet no “newspapers” as such, but when they did arrive on the scene in the main German cities in the seventeenth century, they took over the old word Zeitung, cognate with English “tidings,” as in the biblical Christmas-story phrase “tidings of great joy.” The German word Zeit, of course, basically means “time”; it was also later used in the word for printed periodicals, like magazines or journals, which were and still are called Zeitschriften in German—“writings or publications issued from time to time.”

European Origins of the Broadside

Broadsides as such—single pieces of paper printed on one side—appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages, even before the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century. Woodcuts and metalcuts were widespread, often small in format and with minimal texts. The great majority of them were devotional prints portraying the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ and the lives and martyrdoms of saints, particularly the Virgin Mary. There is a striking one of Saint Augustine preaching to a kneeling congregation and addressing the Holy Trinity, who appear in the upper right corner. Saint Francis receiving the stigmata was a popular subject, as were John the Baptist and Saint Christopher, and Saint Martin sharing his cloak with the beggar. A curious print of the side wound of Christ, with hands and feet revealing their wounds also, reminds us of the later Moravian emphasis on the wound theology.

The metalcuts, which appear to be limited to the second half of the fifteenth century, have a different look from the woodcuts, which resemble line drawings. The metalcuts, with every surface filled with designs, resemble textiles or tapestries. The Rhineland metalcut was a relief print combining characteristics of woodcut and engraving on a plate of copper or lead. Backgrounds were often filled in with dots punched into the metal, hence they were often called “dotted prints” (German Schrotblatt, French manière criblée). In general the designs were complex, with every surface filled, but by 1500 the increased sophistication of both woodcut and engraving overtook and replaced the metalcut.

Popular Reading Matter and the Broadside

German folk culture scholars have researched rather widely the subject of “popular reading matter” (Volkslesestoff) in the home, especially of the lower classes, urban as well as rural. The meager bookshelf of the common man in the past usually included the minimal farmer’s library (if Protestant) of Bible, sermon book (Hauspostille), prayer book, hymnal, and almanac. Other books could also be found in farmhouses and city workers’ dwellings. These included the so-called chapbooks of entertaining stories, lives of heroes and rogues (like the dashing Rinaldo Rinaldini, for example), pseudo-saints’ stories (Genoveva, for example), travel accounts, love stories, joke books, and similar productions.

Earlier, in the Middle Ages, when few people could read and before printed books made their appearance, oral literature circulated. This included such materials as the fairytale or fable (Märchen), the myth, the legend (Sage), and the jest. In the Middle Ages there were manuscript books, but these were largely the province of the clergy and educated nobles or the wealthy urban patrician class. Hence these extremely popular oral materials were often formally read or recited, and undoubtedly sometimes sung, to a rapt group of listeners by a skilled and often itinerant storyteller—as is still the case in some traditional cultures of Asia and Africa.

The book revolution brought about by the invention of printing in the fifteenth century reshaped the field, and oral folk literature was transmuted into print. The Bible was put into German and medieval epics and stories became the chapbook or Volksbuch. The jests were collected into printed joke books, like the Eulenspiegel series, for example, and dream books and other exciting or titillating genres made their appearance at the markets and fairs and were eagerly bought, carried home, and read.

A novel category of popular reading matter—and the one on which we now focus—was the broadside. Medieval woodblock prints preceded the broadside before the rise of printing with movable type, but they had only minimal texts and one focused on the picture. As pointed out above, some of these were bound into rough book formats, usually dealing with one subject, such as the Lives of the Saints, the Passion of Christ, or the Dance of Death.

The earliest true printed broadsides of set type plus woodcut or other illustrations were of several kinds. When they reported on local or national events as “news” (Nachrichten, Berichte), they went by the name Newe Zeytung. An example of a fifteenth-century Newe Zeytung is the letter Columbus sent in 1493 to the royal treasurer Sanchez, reporting on his discoveries in the New World. This was news indeed and exciting news at that.

The Newe Zeytung type of broadside continued in popularity through much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until the people’s thirst for news finally led to the establishment of the first German newspapers. The news broadside, however, continued operating parallel to the newspaper, often reporting on sensational crimes, criminal confessions, the appearance of comets and other heavenly phenomena, etc. Many of these broadside stories were reworked into ballads ending with pointed moral warnings to the reader, which a newspaper account might not necessarily include.

It is of great interest to compare the themes of the fifteenth-century broadsides—the earliest in the age of the printed word—with the themes and range of the Pennsylvania German broadside. Let us do just that by going through the volume Einblattdrucke des XV. Jahrhunderts: Ein Bibliographisches Verzeichnis (1914). This indispensable book catalogs 1,574 separate items printed by the year 1500 as found in the major public and private collections in Europe available at the time to the compilers. Some examples, the editors report, turned up in unusual places: bound into books, tied up in bundles of Akten on dusty archive shelves, or listed temptingly for purchase in sale catalogs of secondhand book dealers.

First of all, a survey of this pioneer checklist of the European broadside repertoire shows many items that find no or only peripheral resonance in the Pennsylvania German broadside world. There are, for instance, hundreds of Ablassbriefe, or indulgence letters, many issued in the 1470s for the benefit of the struggle against the Turks and the defense of Rhodes and Cyprus. Others were for the benefit of individual churches, monasteries, or monastic orders. There are also Pestbriefe, or pestilence letters, some with prayers to Saint Anna (mother of the Virgin Mary) against incursions of the plague. Many Catholic prayer sheets with petitions to other saints are found too—to Christopher and, most interesting, to Dionysus—for protection against the so-called French sickness or French pox, i.e., syphilis. Certain song broadsides, like “Es flog ein kleines Waldvögelein” (There Flew a Little Woodland Bird), circa 1498, listed the tunes to which they were sung. In addition, there are prayers directed to Christ and to the Virgin Mary.

For the parish priests there are lists of the gospel readings for each Sunday of the church year. Spiritual songs appear also, a good example being “Was Freud ist hier in diesem Jammerthale?” (What Joy Is Here in This Vale of Tears?). Papal bulls and missives proliferate, including the bull for the canonization of Saint Leopold in 1485. There are also edicts of secular rulers. A few medical broadsides turn up, as, for example, “Instructions on Making the Balsam or Salve of Mary Magdalene” (ca. 1480), and even a Laxierkalender, or schedule of purgation for the taking of laxatives. Finally there are the secular invitations to elaborately staged shooting matches held in the towns, with attractive prizes (Glückshafen). One shooting match, at Speyer in 1487, added an additional enticement—the killing of a pig by blind participants—zu einem Sau-Totschlagen für Blinde—not exactly a children’s game of Blind Man’s Buff.

• 1. The Almanac, printed as a one-page calendar.
  
• 2. The Himmelsbrief, or heaven-letter, the earliest of which seems to be the Saint Michael version (ca. 1500).
  
• 3. The Letter of Publius Lentulus, Epistola de Christo.
  
• 4. The Spiritual Song (Geistliches Lied) of the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross (ca. 1500).
  
• 5. The Ages of Man, even accompanied with the verses—popular in Pennsylvania—ending with 90—der Kinder Spott, and 100—Gnad des Gott.
  
• 6. Instructions for Bleeding or Cupping (Aderlassungen), ca. 1470. These instructions are, however, given in verse form. In Pennsylvania they were found in the back of the early almanacs.

How were broadsides marketed in the past? When we look at the marketing system for such ephemera as the broadside, we have to consider the places or events at which great numbers of people gathered in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. First of all, there were the Jahrmärkte, or annual fairs, held in the cities, although many localities featured spring and fall fairs, usually linked to a saint’s day. Towns of a size between village and city were often, technically speaking, market towns, with legally prescribed market privileges. In addition, the villages held annual Kirchweihen or Kirchmessen (Kirmessen), originally in honor of the parish’s patron saint, later and into the present day a secular town fair, held once a year, with a carnival-like atmosphere. At all these widely attended festivals of faith and merchandising, booths were set up where broadsides and saints’ prints were sold, and many a peasant or townsman bought them to take home with him.

In the case of a saint’s picture or religious scene, the piece might end up in a primitive frame in the so-called “holy corner” of the farmhouse. This was the Catholic practice. Protestant peasants might also purchase broadsides or prints for display on the walls of their homes. A picture of Luther or Calvin might remind them how Protestant they were, and an engraving of a popular court preacher at Heidelberg or Stuttgart might serve as a role model for growing children, since the family probably had a sermon book (Postille) in the house from the pen of that eloquent clergyman.

Apart from public gatherings such as markets and fairs, broadsides and devotional prints were also marketed by traveling peddlers, usually called colporteurs, who tramped through the countryside, staying overnight in the farmhouses, where they often brought news and scandal and new songs from the outside world. If they peddled song broadsides, they probably sang them in the family circle. That way family members learned the tune from hearing it through thirty-two or more verses of a ballad, and they bought the ballad broadside for the words.

Among the earliest broadsides to be peddled in the countryside were the indulgence broadsides. These were blessed by the Catholic hierarchy and sold by itinerant friars, some of whom had reputations that were on the shady side. An indulgence was a promise that a soul could be freed from the temporal penalties for sin, i.e., from Purgatory. They first appear in the eleventh century, and the money from their sale went to Rome. In the early sixteenth century an indulgence peddler named Tetzel, working the Saxon towns and countryside in the time of Luther, is credited with creating one of the most intriguing advertising jingles in the history of merchandizing. It goes, in German:

Sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt,
Die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt!

I have translated this as:

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from Purgatory springs!

Or if you prefer this one, also my own:

As soon as the coin rings in the chest,
The soul springs forth to heavenly rest!

Which is as good as any of the Burma Shave jingles that used to distract drivers along our highways.

The principle involved in the indulgence was that the people who bought these documents thought that as soon as they were paid for, the soul of a dead kinsman or kinswoman could leave Purgatory, the so-called intermediate state between Heaven and Hell, to which souls that were not quite ready for Heaven were consigned to be purged of their sins. In folk prints these souls are pictured standing in the midst of flames, and they are referred to as “poor souls,” probably the origin of our common English expression “poor souls” for persons who are somehow deficient in some way and need attention.

The sale of indulgences in the sixteenth century was one of the causes that sparked Luther’s call for reformation. Protestantism abolished Purgatory as an imaginary clearinghouse between Heaven and Hell, thus making man’s eternal destiny black and white, so to speak—either Hell or Heaven, with no gray Purgatory in between.

Broadside Peddlers in Trouble with the Law

According to the council minutes of German cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, itinerant song peddlers and street singers were often considered a nuisance and were warned to clear out or face imprisonment. A petition sent in to the City Council of Breslau by the town’s bookbinders complained “that hitherto divers young rogues (losse Buben) have been found here at the yearly fairs and also between the fairs, with various pictures, new tidings and songs, which they not only sold, but also even publicly cry out and sing.”

Another amusing reference comes from Nürnberg, where in 1594 the local booksellers and broadside producers (Briefmaler) threatened to clear away the “New Tidings” carriers and song singers from the streets and taverns. So here we get the picture that the broadside sellers entered the public houses to sell their wares and entertain the drinking and eating guests, much as flower sellers and lottery-ticket vendors still enter taverns today in some parts of Europe to circulate among the people offering their wares.

Another blast against broadside song peddlers is dated 1742 and comes from the Circle of Swabia (Württemberg). Because of the company in which they were included, it appears that their reputation had not perceptibly risen since the seventeenth century—they were still marginal characters in German society. The document, with italics added, reads as follows:

All foreign beggars and vagrants, either Christian or Jew, deserters and dismissed soldiers, peddlers or such folk, who have for sale all kinds of little riffraff wares such as toothpicks, tooth powder, hair butter, bouquets of flowers, shoe blacking, printed songs, and the like, and carry them about and under this pretence actually beg, principally too the singers of scandalous songs, itinerant students, hurdy-gurdy players, dudelsack blowers and other pipers, zither players, strap cutters, lottery criers, etc., shall immediately betake themselves out of the region of this Circle of Swabia.

In the Danube lands, as well as elsewhere in Europe, the pamphlet and picture peddlers often got into trouble with the authorities, especially the ecclesiastical censors. In 1667 the Jesuits, as officially appointed censors, roamed the Linz Market and seized schändliche Liedertexte, Bilder und Bücher und übergaben sie den Flammen (scandalous song texts, pictures, and books, and committed them to the flames). They also seized amulets peddled by the same individuals on the grounds that they spread the contagion of superstition. In 1752 and 1759 official edicts prohibited the introduction of forbidden (Lutheran) books, which were entering the province from Protestant Germany.

The most amusing case occurred in 1754, in the official account of which we even learn the nickname of the peddler. The priest of Harthausen in that year complained over a certain book and picture peddler from Bavaria,

commonly called Brief-Steffl [literally Broadside Steven], who in that region went around peddling his wares. In general, such vagabond pamphlet and picture hawkers are always a danger in the villages, even when they are Catholic, since, through their greediness for sales, all kinds of superstitious blessings, prayers, disgraceful songs and other things, endangering faith and morals, are spread about among the simple and credulous farmer folk, the like of which I collected a whole basketful from my parishioners and burned.

From all of this it appears that the streets of German towns must have been amusing, entertaining, and irresistible to the urban public, who were always ready for free entertainment.

The Broadside in Great Britain and Anglo-America

From the Rhineland and the Netherlands the art of printing reached England, whence it spread to all parts of the British Isles. The usual date for the beginning of printing in England under William Caxton, who was trained in Germany, is 1475.

With the Protestant Reformation in Britain and the strong influences within it from the Reformed Church world of Geneva and Zurich, religious pictures, as for example saints’ prints, came under question. Ernest B. Gilman deals with this issue in Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (1986). He points out that images “devised by mennes phantasies” were prohibited in 1547 as downgrading Scripture, the Word of God, in devotional life. Permitted, however, were images that acted as objects of “remembraunce, whereby, men may be admonished, of the holy lifes and conversacion of theim, that the sayde Images do represent.”

Hence Bible illustrations were permitted and enjoyed by English Protestants, even by Puritans. Francis Quarles, who created the most popular emblem book in British history, used the allegorical emblem with its moral poetry attached, as “hieroglyphics” and “silent parables.” So emblems were also permitted for English Protestants. And from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, British printers produced an immense spate of illustrated broadsides—street literature—as well as the Hogarth, Cruikshank, and Rowlandson satiric prints and caricatures, for which England became famous indeed. (For the proliferation of song and ballad broadsides in Great Britain, and the solid research into their origins and history, see the Bibliographical Essay.)

The art of printing arrived in the Americas in the sixteenth century in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The first actual printing in the New World was done in Mexico in the 1530s. A century later printing arrived in New England and the other English-speaking colonies, with such productions as the Bay Psalm Book of 1639. Broadsides proliferated in New England, and they have been treated in various monographs and articles emanating from the American Antiquarian Society and other scholarly institutions of the area.

For American backgrounds to Pennsylvania German broadside production, the reader is now directed to the Middle Colonies, with Philadelphia as the leading publishing center, later overtaken by the publishing interests of New York City.

Philadelphia as a Publishing Center

From its beginnings in the 1680s, Philadelphia has been a major American publishing center. Concentrated here were the principal Quaker presses; the Presbyterian Publication Society; the American Sunday School Union, with its vast publication of children’s literature and other ephemera; the oldest continuing publishing house in the United States, J. B. Lippincott Company; the Curtis Publishing Company, with its empire of family magazines; the Farm Journal Company, with its national Farm Journal; the American Catholic Historical Society; and the Jewish Publication Society. Unfortunately, these firms and their publications have not all been researched, but I do recall a several-hundred-page volume listing and describing all the books, pamphlets, and ephemera that issued from the presses of the Presbyterian Publication Society, expressing all the interests and concerns of that national denomination in the nineteenth century.

The Philadelphia Song Broadsides

In the nineteenth century Philadelphia was a center of music publishing and also of the production of cheap song broadsides. The songs—just the words, no music—were published on half sheets, usually on cheap paper. They were issued by enterprising printing establishments like Auner, Johnson, Zieber, King, DuBree, Warren, Scroggy, and others. Most of them advertised themselves, like J. H. Johnson of No. 5 North Tenth Street, Philadelphia, as “Song Publisher, Card and Job Printer,” with the additional hint: “Cards, Circulars, Bill Heads, &c., &c., Neatly Printed.” On another Johnson broadside we learn that “Johnson has 600 different kinds of songs, call and he will give you a Catalogue of them, then you can see his large assortment.”

The subject matter of the songs ranged over many areas of American popular culture of the mid- and later nineteenth century. There were sentimental, comic, and patriotic songs among them. The Civil War brought a decided upswing in their production. There were also many dialect and ethnic numbers—Negro, Dutch (German), and Irish especially. The Irish emigrant songs were particularly poignant about the Erin left behind across the Atlantic. Some songs satirized local events, politicians, or organizations like the rival fire companies of the city.

Some of the songs were published to cash in on performances at local music venues. For example, “Hazel Dell, as sung at Jenkins’ Saloon, 7th & Chestnut Sts.,” was touted by its publisher, John L. Zieber, as “The most Popular Song of the Day!” It turns out that the Jenkins location was dignified with the name of “Concert Saloon”; another of its hits was “Maggie by My Side,” as sung there by Miss Jenny Mandeville. Another venue was the Kossuth Concert Saloon, named for the nineteenth-century Hungarian patriot, and the song “Abraham’s Daughter” was sung there by Billy Ward.

The sentimental songs often used fictitious locales, as in “Bonnie Eloise, The Belle of the Mohawk Vale”—one of Zieber’s “popular editions,” composed by W. Percival. “Peanut Gal” and “Nelly Was a Lady” used Negro dialect. There were numerous sequel songs, as for example “I Am Not Angry,” the answer to “Don’t Be Angry, Mother,” and “Willie’ll Roam No More,” the answer to “Willie, We Have Missed You.” As these examples suggest, many songs parodied the popular offerings of local “vocalists,” as the saloon singers were called. And in 1889 there was a spate of song broadsides commemorating and commiserating the Johnstown Flood, including a doleful item with the title “Oh, Conemaugh!”

These Philadelphia songs represent American popular culture in its nineteenth-century mood. This vast body of ephemera was distinctive of Philadelphia’s urban culture and enterprise. It was tangentially related to the Pennsylvania Dutch culture upstate since copies did filter into the hinterlands and were sometimes pasted into scrapbooks kept by Dutchmen.

There is, of course, a huge collection of this genre of street literature at the Library Company, which was surveyed by Edwin Wolf in his pioneering book cataloging the Library Company’s song broadsides. There is also a large deposit of these Philadelphia imprints in the Free Library and a significant number in the Roughwood Collection.

Broadside Scrapbooks

Many Pennsylvanians in the nineteenth century made scrapbooks of favorite broadsides, especially those featuring songs. There are several such books of collectanea in the Roughwood Collection. The most interesting of these is the scrapbook made by Llewellyn Hughes of Philadelphia in the 1850s and 1860s. He used a copy of Mitchell’s School Atlas, published in Philadelphia by Cowperthwait, Desilver, and Butler in 1852. He left some of the colored maps in place but literally filled the rest of the book with pasted-in Philadelphia song broadsides, many of them now rarities.

Most of these pieces include at the bottom advertisements for the publisher and his wares, as for example: “JOHN W DU BREE, CARD & JOB PRINTER, & SONG PUBLISHER, No. 1169 South Eleventh St., Phila. Printing of all descriptions executed 30 per cent less than any other Office in the city. Just published, an Illuminated edition of Volunteer Cards, Envelopes, Letter and Note Paper, &c., for sale, Wholesale and Retail.” Another Philadelphia publisher, Zieber and Company, appended the sour-grapes note: “Retailers should bear in mind that we publish all the latest comic and sentimental songs, far in advance of other publishers, who only wait until we publish them, when they cabbage the same, and, by altering them, publish them as new.”

The same scrapbook yielded a unique earlier broadside in English, an elegy entitled “To the Memory of JAMES GIFFORD, Who was Killed By the Bursting of a Cannon on the 24th, Day of December 1832, Aged 20 Years 9 Months and 10 Days at Tuckahoe, New Jersey.” It was published by Mahan and Kelly, Printers, 27 North Seventh St., Philadelphia, and recounts the gruesome details of the young man’s death. The cannon firing took place on the day before Christmas, and very probably the firing was intended as Christmas noisemaking, a custom common in the nineteenth century in the American South, in western Pennsylvania, and in other areas.

Major National Institutions for Broadside Research

Two American institutions involved in broadside collecting, out of the many scholarly libraries and historical societies in the nation, should be mentioned. First, the American Antiquarian Society, founded in 1812 by the Massachusetts publisher Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831), himself a collector of broadsides and other ephemera, has become through the decades since its founding the depository of the largest collection of early printed Americana—books, pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides. Located in Worcester in central Massachusetts, the library of the Society is constantly used by research scholars from all over the United States and Europe. Its publication, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society: A Journal of American History and Culture Through 1876, makes major contributions to American historiography, with generous doses on the history of American printing and the imprints issued by American publishers.

Second, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the oldest scholarly library in the nation, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731, offers the researcher vast collections of printed Americana. In 2000 the Library Company acquired, by purchase and gift, the immense collection of pre-1801 American imprints brought together in the past twenty years by the genial and indefatigable Michael Zinman. This is actually the largest such collection assembled by a single collector in the twentieth century and outnumbers all institutional collections in the United States except for the top half-dozen libraries. This invaluable collection added more than 7,800 books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed before 1801 within the United States, plus about 2,700 duplicates, and around 1,000 magazine issues. The Zinman Collection has significantly broadened the national perimeters of the Library Company’s holdings by adding an exceedingly rare variety of New England imprints.

A third institution that studies but does not collect broadsides is the Bibliographical Society of America, which, according to its newsletter, is “the oldest scholarly society in North America dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects.” Organized in New York City in 1904, it promotes bibliographical research and publishes books and North America’s leading bibliographical journal, the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, which through the years has offered articles on carriers’ addresses, elegies, and other broadside material.

The Broadside in Pennsylvania German Culture

The broadside, including the pictorial print, has played a major role in the culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch people from the eighteenth century to the present. The broadsides can be seen as printed expressions of most of the central themes and interests of the culture. They are, in fact, an index of what the culture is all about, and one could reconstruct much of the cultural world of the Pennsylvania Dutch from an analysis of the total surviving broadside corpus.

Having surveyed the development and history of the broadside in Europe, Britain, and Anglo-America, I intend in this section to take a thorough look at the broadside as it developed and was used in Pennsylvania German culture. While other subjects will also be covered, I will focus here on three groups connected with Pennsylvania German broadsides: the printers who produced them for the public; the poets and peddlers who wrote and marketed the texts; and the collectors and bibliographers whose holdings and imprint checklists enable us to see the larger picture of broadside production.

The concept of ephemera, of course, includes more than one-sheet printed materials. The enterprising country printers who issued our broadsides also produced German and English books, pamphlets, tracts, chapbooks with entertaining stories from the Middle Ages and later, almanacs that were hung in the farmhouse kitchen, where they could be consulted for the proper times of planting and harvesting, and weekly newspapers. The Readinger Adler, for example, ran for more than a century in German dress, then emerged in English as the Reading Eagle and is still published, although now a daily.

The printers very often made their own woodcut illustrations for their broadsides, books, chapbooks, and almanacs. This was the case with Gustav S. Peters of Harrisburg and Peter Montelius of Reamstown and Greenbriar. Joining hands with the printers in the production of the broadside were the country schoolmasters of the German parochial schools upstate. Henrich Otto, founder of a dynasty of fraktur artists, undoubtedly engraved the woodblocks used in producing his handsome printed taufscheins—birth and baptismal certificates—beginning in the 1780s. He also filled in many of them with striking red-ink fraktur lettering and obligingly painted the bird-and-floral borders with watercolors. Throughout later chapters of the book deserved tributes will be paid to these and other talented producers of broadside material. It was also the schoolmasters and local clergymen who penned the doleful verses on the broadside ballads relating local tragedies, adding their didactic warnings on how to avoid the path of sin that led to the tragedy.

German Printing in Pennsylvania

The production of German-language books, pamphlets, almanacs, newspapers, and broadsides for the Pennsylvania Dutch people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forms an immense bibliographical deposit. To this has to be added the parallel English-language materials from the same period published for the Pennsylvania Dutch in Pennsylvania and the Diaspora (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and other midwestern states, and Ontario in Canada). There were urban presses in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, and smaller town presses in Reading, Allentown, Easton, Lebanon, Lancaster, York, Orwigsburg, Pottsville, Greensburg, Schellsburg, Harrisburg, and elsewhere.

The upcountry small-town presses, like the urban establishments, issued newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemera. They were job printers from whom the local population commissioned broadsides of all sorts, such as are represented in this book—songs and ballads; baptismal, confirmation, and marriage certificates; funeral invitations and elegies; songs and ballads; sale bills and other advertisements; New Year’s wishes and carriers’ addresses, etc. Unfortunately, the account books of such small local presses are not available. In the case of the Readinger Adler, the accounts were preserved and were available for the researches of Alfred L. Shoemaker into the broadside production of Hohman, Schuller, Krebs, and others.

Pennsylvania German Reading Matter

What reading matter—books, almanacs, and other ephemera, including broadsides—did the average Pennsylvania Dutchman have in his home? The European travelers, especially those of German background and education, who visited the Dutch Country in the nineteenth century often sneered at what they considered the “ignorance” and limited viewpoint of the Pennsylvania Dutch. The most pointed of these was Hermann Bokum (1807–78), an emigrant of 1826 from Königsberg in East Prussia, who served the Reformed Church as pastor, teacher, and translator; he also served as professor of the German and French languages at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote a little book called The Stranger’s Gift (1836), which, in addition to having as its frontispiece one of America’s earliest representations of the Christmas tree, offers a damaging and very biased report. On a visit to a “typical” Pennsylvania German household, Bokum turned to the bookshelf, where he found that “the Bible, some books on dreaming and witchcraft, and one or two German newspapers, form the whole stock. In glancing at the latter, you meet with another piece of Americo-Germanism—German words with English terminations, or the reverse.”

“Their intercourse with Germany,” he continues, “has obviously been interrupted for many years, since the few new thoughts, which the progress in science and art has conveyed to them, are entirely expressed in the English language.” After his brief visit among the “Dutch,” he joined with “intelligent and cultivated German emigrants and Americo-Germans” in “heartily desiring that soon this corrupt dialect of the German language, together with all its evil consequences, may give way to the moral and intellectual light which, for more than a century, has been the source of incalculable blessings to those portions of the United States which have been brought under its influence.”

More balanced than Bokum’s tirade is the excellent scholarly analysis of the education and reading habits of the Pennsylvania Dutch population in the eighteenth century, in James Owen Knauss, “Social Conditions Among the Pennsylvania Germans in the Eighteenth Century, as Revealed in the German Newspapers Published in America,” a Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation (1922). In a chapter entitled “The Education and the Educational Facilities of the Pennsylvania Germans,” he describes the elementary parochial schools of the Lutheran and Reformed churches that existed everywhere. These church schools operated in both country congregations and urban settings. Special schools for girls were conducted by the Moravians, and institutions of higher learning included the University of Pennsylvania, which had a Deutsches Institut, or German Academy, with instruction in German, and, after 1787, Franklin College in Lancaster.

Knauss emphasizes the many book advertisements by urban booksellers that appeared in the German newspapers with some of the titles. The chapter is especially good on its estimate of the popularity of the old German Volksbücher, or chapbooks. There were German bookstores in Philadelphia and the upcountry Dutch towns, and by 1800 almost every newspaper publisher issued an almanac. There were even libraries, as for example the Juliana Bibliothek Gesellschaft, founded in Lancaster in 1766. While he does not mention broadsides in his discussion of reading matter, they certainly were included. Knauss’s closing statement is worth presenting here:

In my attempt to describe the education and the educational facilities of the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans, I am sure that the facts warrant the statement that these people were not without ideals in educational lines, that they were not as ignorant as has sometimes been stated, and that there was a continuous development in literary taste and in educational ideals. Granting that the aims of many of them, especially in the rural districts, were very narrow, nevertheless, I believe that they compared very favorably with those of the descendants of other nationalities who were similarly located. If the leaders of a class of people saw so clearly the advantages of libraries and of schools, and made such earnest attempts to establish them, there was reason for optimism about their future development.

Gustav S. Peters, Ephemera Printer

Undoubtedly the most significant printer of ephemera for the Pennsylvania Germans was Gustav Sigismund Peters (1793–1847), a native of Saxony trained as a printer in Leipzig, who emigrated in the 1820s. From 1823 to 1828 he did printing in partnership with John Moser in Carlisle, then in 1828 moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital city, where he produced many types of printed wares until his death. As William Woys Weaver, one of his recent biographers, has written, he embarked in Harrisburg “on a nineteen year career as printer and publisher of books and reading matter for the Pennsylvania Dutch, particularly for Pennsylvania Dutch children. His gemlike toy books with color plates, his charming woodcuts and delightful broadsides, are now among the most sought after prizes on the American rare book market.”

Peters has been described by a contemporary, State Librarian William H. Egle, who knew him personally, “as short and fat (well fed), with blond hair and the features of a ‘jolly old elf.’” He was a bachelor, living alone in Nagel’s Hotel, although sometimes he slept all night in a chair by his stove in the printing office. Weaver devoted a recent volume to Peters’s last work, the little cookbook called Die geschickte Hausfrau (The Handy Housewife), which was published after his death. His death caused quite a stir in quiet Harrisburg. Let us let Weaver tell it:

No doubt he enjoyed a thousand laughs among the angels when it was discovered in his will that his stomach was to be removed from his corpse, stuffed with snuff, and placed between his legs for the public to admire at his viewing. This added a wonderfully morbid note of hocus-pocus to what otherwise would have been an unspectacular departure. The day after Peters was buried at Harrisburg’s Mt. Kalma Cemetery, his executors discovered his will and out of duty, duly exhumed the corpse to carry out this bizarre last request, much to the scandal of everyone involved.

These gruesome details would be of little value to our sketch of Gustav Peters and Die geschickte Hausfrau—and would have caused a much greater scandal at the time—if they had not been quickly clouded up in mystery or, rather, quietly suppressed by Peters’s trusted friends and executors, Johann Martin Lutz and Theodore F. Scheffer, who were also his legal heirs and the actual publishers of the cookbook. Gustav Peters died on March 22, 1847, just as he had predicted two years earlier in his will. One could wonder whether he did not guarantee his speedy end as specified with an artful potion concocted from one of his innumerable books on chemistry. Or was it uncanny coincidence?

Additional material on Peters as printer and publisher appeared in the catalog of Pennsylvania German Birth and Baptismal Certificates, compiled by Harry A. Focht for the Perry Historians and published in their journal, the Perry Review, in 1998. In addition to standard biographical material, this book offers an extremely valuable section analyzing the nineteen-page inventory of the Peters estate in the Dauphin County courthouse.

The inventory meticulously lists all of Peters’s printing and binding materials and equipment, stereotype plates for seventeen books, German and English, and the woodblocks for his toy books for juveniles. Most intriguing are the appraisers’ lists of the remaining broadsides—“German Doufshines,” “Doufshines coloured (English)” and “Doufshines plain,” and many sheets of pictures. Actually, when Peters died, his shop had a stock of 2,556 taufscheins, and of these 1,320 were in German and 684 in English.

The Focht volume also includes useful biographical materials on the major successor of Peters, Theodore Frederick Scheffer (1813–83). Scheffer was born in Magdeburg in Saxony-Anhalt, emigrated in 1833, and was evidently working with Peters by 1840. After Peters died, Scheffer worked in partnership with John Martin Lutz, a Harrisburg druggist, and later with Jacob M. Beck. Lutz and Scheffer published the unusual colored taufschein whose biblical figures were derived from the title page of the original edition of the King James Bible in 1611. In 1863 Scheffer established a stationery and bookstore in connection with his print shop on South Second Street.

The Philadelphia German Publishers

In addition to upstate printers like Peters and other newspaper publishers and print-shop operators in the Pennsylvania county seats, the Philadelphia publishers, many of them German emigrants, also produced and sold broadsides. Out of the many that could be dealt with, I have chosen to focus on two urban printing firms—the publishing and book business of Ignatius Kohler, and the firm of Schäfer and Koradi.

Ignatius Kohler (1817–1901) was a German emigrant from the former principality of Hohenzollern, now part of Baden-Württemberg, who founded a major German printing establishment in Philadelphia. The Catalog der Verlags-Buchhandlung von I. Kohler, No. 202 Nord Vierte Strasse, Philadelphia (Catalog of the Publishing and Book Business of I. Kohler, 202 N. Fourth St., Philadelphia) is a twenty-six-page booklet issued in 1872. In addition to its listing of imported and Kohler-printed works, it contains a full list of the German-language devotional classics used by the Pennsylvania Dutch and by Philadelphia’s German-American community.

On page 25 we get to the broadsides. In addition to portrait prints, suitable for framing and display, of Christ, Luther, and Washington, and a colored print, German and English, of the Declaration of Independence, there were the following certificates: Taufscheine, German or English, handsomely colored, at twelve cents a copy; the same, black and white, at eight cents a copy; Trauscheine (wedding certificates), black and white at eight cents a copy; and Confirmationsscheine, black and white, at eight cents a copy. And for good measure, a print of the Ten Commandments was offered in German, a color reproduction for Sunday Schools, at five cents a copy.

For the German religious trade the Kohler firm offered family Bibles and standard devotional works—the prayer books of Habermann and Stark, Arndt’s Wahres Christenthum (True Christianity), Gossner’s Schatzkästchen (Little Treasury), Hübner’s Biblische Geschichten (Bible Stories), Mel’s Posaunen der Ewigkeit (Trumpets of Eternity), and various chorale and hymnbooks, including Der Sänger am Grabe (The Singer at the Grave). All of these items were favorite devotional works among the Pennsylvania Dutch church people. In addition, Kohler offered the latest German novels and short-story books, German-American cookbooks, and other popular items. It was quite an array for a Philadelphia book business and, of course, the firm catered as well to the German-American community in many states of the Union.

Another German-American publishing business that issued broadsides, in particular colored baptismal certificates, was the firm of Schäfer and Koradi, from the partnership of Ernst Karl Schäfer (1821–78), a Leipzig publisher and book handler who came to Philadelphia in 1848, and Rudolph Koradi (1824–1907), a native of Zurich who arrived in 1850 and joined in partnership with Schäfer in 1851. Koradi was named Swiss consul in 1857 and served in this capacity for fifty years. And at Schäfer’s early death in 1878, Koradi took over the book business.

There were, of course, other German printers, publishers, and booksellers in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The German book trade was so great in the city and its Pennsylvania Dutch environs that even English printers added German works to their line, as had happened frequently in the eighteenth century, even in the case of Benjamin Franklin. One of these firms was the Quaker partnership of Kimber and Sharpless. In 1828 they issued one of the handsomest German Bibles that ever appeared in America. Its fine original engravings are still memorable. Another bilingual Philadelphia firm that developed “the largest German printing office ever conducted by Americans” was King and Baird, who printed a large stock of both English and German books.

The Country Schoolmaster and the Broadside

Along with such innovative printers as G. S. Peters, whose range of printed ephemera for the Pennsylvania Dutch people heads the list, and the versatile John George Hohman, the star players in the broadside world were the country schoolmasters. Before the establishment of the state system of public schools, beginning in 1834, our Pennsylvania Dutch denominations conducted schools of their own—Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian, Mennonite, Brethren, and others. In most cases, the Lutheran and Reformed congregations, in the country at least, operated as union churches (gemeinschaftliche Kirchen)—one church building with alternating Lutheran and Reformed services, a union school, a union cemetery, and often a union church council (Kirchenrath).

In the cities and larger towns the two denominations usually built and conducted separate churches and schools—like Trinity Lutheran Church and First Reformed Church in Lancaster, and Trinity Lutheran and First Reformed in Reading, for example. But in the country hundreds of union churches were founded and built, and the pattern spread with the Pennsylvania Dutch Diaspora into the South and Midwest. These institutions were outstanding examples of community churches, indeed of grassroots ecumenical collaboration and coexistence. They were the spiritual centers of the rural community.

The parochial schools sponsored by the union churches were customarily housed in a long building near the church, with a schoolroom at one end and the living quarters of the schoolmaster at the other. The schoolmasters were hired by the church council on a yearly basis and paid so much per pupil. These institutions were sometimes called “pay schools,” a term that distinguished them from the state schools that took their place—the “free schools” of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

In the country congregations the schoolmaster was second only to the minister in importance. In fact, since he often catechized the young people, i.e., taught them as they headed for confirmation, he was in effect the assistant minister. This was especially true because the ministers usually had a multiple-congregation parish, with sometimes up to twelve or more churches in the pioneer era. These they served on a circuit plan, much like the Methodist “circuit riders” of early America.

The schoolmaster also assisted the minister by playing the organ for the church services and often acted as “foresinger” or “cantor,” leading the singing. The earlier system involved “lining out” the hymns, i.e., repeating the first two verses and then singing them. This was a somewhat cumbersome procedure, but probably necessary since not everyone had a hymnbook. Despite its disadvantages, the system had the advantage of teaching the congregation the words of the hymns. One of my Dutch aunts, Emma L. Yoder (1873–1961), who attended German church services all her growing-up days, told me that she learned the words of her favorite German hymns through the lining-out system. And she had, when I recorded her in the 1950s and `60s, an unmatched memory for the German hymns that were sung in the union church in Schuylkill County that my family belonged to.

The tunes of the hymns, some of them the elaborate and moving German chorale tunes from the seventeenth century, as well as the more lively “Yankee” tunes from New England, were taught to the young people by the schoolmaster in his classes, or in special winter “singing schools” (Singschulen). These were conducted in the church either by the resident schoolmaster or by a traveling “singing school” master. These were joyous occasions for the young people, who treated them as courting sessions, i.e., boyfriends took their girlfriends to the classes and they all learned the tunes together.

Some of the early schoolmasters whose talents included expert frakturing were famous for the manuscript hymn-tune booklets (Notenbüchlein) that they prepared for their pupils, with handsome fraktur title pages with the name of the student and often the phrase “diligent pupil of music” in the named school. Many fine examples were the product of Mennonite schools, particularly in the Franconia Conference area of Bucks and Montgomery Counties, although not all the teachers in these schools were Mennonite. Most of them, in fact, like John Adam Eyer, for example, were Lutheran or Reformed.

Some of our Lutheran and Reformed schoolmasters even edited tune books for publication, to be used in their singing schools in the German congregations. These included a preliminary section on the rudiments of music and the tunes were given completely, although the texts of the hymns to each tune were usually only given in one verse. Thus these books were singing-instruction books rather than hymnbooks proper. Most early Pennsylvania German hymnals offered the words of hymns only, except for a few examples that offered one line of the tune, at least for the Psalms.

Since the schoolmasters were, in a sense, the local guardians of morality, at least in inculcation of moral values in the children of the congregation through their instruction, they often engaged in the production of broadsides. After all, one of the functions of the broadside was the promotion of morality. So when a tragedy occurred in the community—a murder, suicide, or accidental death—the schoolmaster often sat down at his desk and composed a doleful yet sensational poem detailing the event. The schoolmasters were the major producers of the widespread “sorrow songs” (Trauerlieder) of the Pennsylvania Dutch people, the German ballads. Of course, in having them printed and selling them in the congregation or over a wider area, i.e., actually peddling them and singing them for the prospective clients who bought them, our parochial schoolmasters added to their meager school income.

While many of these teachers were recalled by their pupils as beloved preceptors, some were problematic. In the all-German schools, there were numerous examples of what the Dutch called “Deitschlenner,” i.e., “Germany-Germans,” who used their continental education to get jobs in a Pennsylvania school. Some were little more than tramps, who, when they got into trouble in one congregation, moved on to another, hopefully concealing their trail of scandal. The reputable ones also usually taught in more than one area of the Dutch Country, and we can trace their movements through the trail of fraktur and broadsides they left behind them. Some of the reputable schoolmasters also used the school experience as a steppingstone into the Lutheran or Reformed ministry.

One of these memorable German pedagogues taught my own grandmother, who attended the German parochial school of the St. Jacob’s Union Lutheran and Reformed Church in the Mahantongo Valley in the 1850s. Grandmother Yoder delighted in reminiscing about this schoolmaster, a native German, and his somewhat negligent method of teaching reading. The class used the German New Testament as a reader, and I still have my grandmother’s copy from those far-off school days. Her story was that when the little children came to a word they could not pronounce or even recognize, the German would wave his ferule and cry out, “Ach! überhupfe den Teufel und fahre nur fort!” (Oh, skip over the devil and just read on!).

John George Hohman (Homan) and the Broadside

All cultures have key figures whose minds and spirits influence the entire population. In the area of both popular printing and folk medicine, the shadowy figure of John George Hohman (Homan) stands above most other players in the pre–Civil War era.

Although he left a trail of evidence behind him, Hohman is essentially a mystery man. He arrived in Philadelphia on October 12, 1802, on the ship Tom, from Hamburg, with his wife and son Philip; and after a long career of producing, writing, revising, and publishing books, ballads, and broadsides, he disappeared after his last book came into print in 1846. So far his origins in Europe and the place and date of his death have not been located. What we do know is that he was a Roman Catholic, which made him a marginal figure in the predominantly Protestant Pennsylvania Dutch culture, but nevertheless his influence on it was profound.

Let us look at his productions. Just a listing of his broadsides and books is impressive indeed. While individual items will be analyzed in later chapters, we will list first his broadsides and then his books, most of which were connected with broadside imprints.

Because he had crossed the Atlantic a poor man, Hohman and his wife were hired out as indentured servants to pay off their passage to the New World. As soon as he achieved his freedom, Hohman began to peddle broadsides. The Readinger Adler account books reveal that on May 29, 1805, he was charged $9.50 for the printing of eight hundred song sheets. No copies have evidently survived; hence we don’t know the song or songs involved or whether the material was European, American, or composed by Hohman himself. The account books report that on September 29 he made a partial payment of $1.50. So he must have been on the road, and his songs must have been selling.

His broadside publication was extensive. His Himmelsbrief of 1811, the text of which states that he brought it to America in 1802, is the first known print of this basic folk-religious document in America. In 1811 he also published the popular Mayerhof Murder Ballad, which he admits improving for better singing, and he added the three last verses. It became a best-seller.

Hohman was certainly the most active ballad peddler in our history. He not only wrote and revised ballads and had them printed in broadside form, he also collected them into little chapbooks in the European fashion. One example appeared at Ephrata in 1828, with the run-on title Drey wunderbare neue Geschichten oder Lieder. Das erste von einem Kleinen Kinde und einem Pudelhund, welches in Russland, im Jahr 1808, im Früjahr, geschehen ist. Das zweite von einem Mädgen, Namens Pally J. welches sich nahe bey York in Pennsylvanien, im Jahr Christi 1806, zugetragen hat. Das 3te von einem in Walde sizende schläfende Böhmischen Bauern. Auf grosses Verlangen zum Druck befördert von Johann Georg Hohman, in Elsass Taunschip, Berks County, Penn. Und nun auf Begehren zum zweytenmal gedruckt. This can be translated as “Three Wonderful New Stories or Songs. The first about a little child and a poodle dog that took place in Russia in the spring of the year 1808. The second concerns a girl, named Polly J., and what happened to her in York, Pennsylvania, in the year of Christ 1806. The third concerns a Bohemian farmer sitting in the woods asleep. On strong demand delivered into print by John George Hohman, in Alsace Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania. And now on request printed in second edition.” The chapbook contains eleven pages and was printed by “J. B.,” Joseph Bauman (1790–1862), a member of the very active Bauman family of printers, who were in a sense successors to the Cloister Press at Ephrata.

Hohman’s book publication was also extensive, including Das Buch von dem Ewigen Jude (1813) (The Book of the Wandering Jew); the Land und Hausapotheke (1818) (The Countryman’s Family Medicine Chest); the Evangelium Nicodemi (1819) (Gospel of Nicodemus), an edition of New Testament apocryphal works; a Catholic catechism, 1819; Der Lang Verborgene Freund (1819–20) (The Long Lost Friend), his most famous work and the most important folk-medical manual of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture; Aufblick der Seele in den Himmel (1842) (The Soul’s Upward Glance into Heaven), a collection of hymns on repentance and conversion; and, last of all, Der Fromme zu Gott in der Andacht (1846) (The Pious Man’s Devotion to God). This last offering begins with Hohman’s version of the pseudepigraphical work, “The Childhood of Jesus,” then moves on to reprint many of the songs and ballads he had earlier published as broadsides.

Bibliographers and Collections

Scholarship on the Pennsylvania German broadside and its background in Europe is a large topic, too large in fact to be included within this introductory chapter. Therefore I include here a discussion of the contribution of the principal nineteenth-century bibliographer, Oswald Seidensticker, and of the pioneering twentieth-century scholar Alfred L. Shoemaker and his colleague Wilbur H. Oda. The other principal collectors and bibliographers will be treated in detail in the Bibliographical Essay. This includes the following Europeans: Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Martin Scharfe, Wolfgang Brückner, Klaus Stopp, Ingrid Faust, William A. Coupe, Nils-Arvid Bringéus, Christa Pieske, James Laver, Charles Hindley, and Maurice Rickards. The American bibliographers include Charles Hildeburn, Charles Evans, and the team of Ralph Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. American collectors and collections include Abraham Harley Cassel, Henry S. Heilman, Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker, Ammon Stapleton, Julius Friedrich Sachse, Henry S. Borneman, Donald A. Shelley, Walter E. Boyer, the Unger-Bassler Collection, the Eastern Mennonite College Collection, and the Roughwood Collection.

The Contribution of Oswald Seidensticker

Oswald Seidensticker (1825–94), called the “father of German-American historiography,” whose once indispensable volume The First Century of German Printing in America (1893) provided American scholars with the first listing of German-language broadsides as well as books, pamphlets, and almanacs, was a native of Göttingen in the former kingdom of Hanover. His father, a Ph.D. and, like many contemporary German liberals, an attorney, got into trouble with the authorities in pressing for a freer constitution and a citizens’ army. In 1836 he was condemned to lifelong imprisonment but was pardoned in 1845 and deported to America. He arrived here in 1846, settling in Philadelphia, where his family joined him.

Meanwhile, Oswald, the oldest son, had attended the University of Göttingen, receiving his Ph.D. in 1846. After varied teaching experiences in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, Dr. Seidensticker was named to the newly established professorship of German Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

His wide researches into Pennsylvania German history took him in search of sources and documents, church registers, and local reminiscences; he even consulted German tombstones at the old country churches, checking names and dates. He formed important friendships with other researchers, including the fascinating self-taught farmer-scholar Abraham Harley Cassel in Montgomery County, and used Cassel’s vast assembly of books, almanacs, brochures, and manuscripts. In 1874 he revisited Germany, retracing the steps of William Penn up the Rhine Valley to the Palatinate.

He was extremely active in the German Society of Pennsylvania, serving as its librarian, president of the Library Committee, and founder and curator of the Society’s archives. He was also a founding member of the Deutscher Pionier-Verein. These activities on behalf of the German-American community led to the great 1883 celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of Germantown, the first German-speaking settlement in the New World, and to the annual celebration of October 6—the date of the landing of the Welcome in 1683—as “German Day.”

After a final trip to Germany and Switzerland in 1891, he died in 1894 and was given a huge funeral at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. The ninety-two-year-old pastor, William H. Furness—who had as a boy shared a school bench with Ralph Waldo Emerson—delivered the funeral sermon. There were other German and English addresses, and the Philadelphia Maennerchor sang at the open coffin “Wie sie so sanft ruhn” (How gently do they rest).

A public memorial service held in the German Society Hall featured even more tributes. Judge S. W. Pennypacker—later governor of the Commonwealth—spoke in English on Seidensticker as a historian, and he was followed on the same subject in German by H. A. Rattermann of Cincinnati. It was Rattermann who portrayed Seidensticker as the actual founder of the historiography of the German element in the United States. Although he had predecessors—Brauns, Rupp, Löher, Klauprecht, Kapp, and others—Seidensticker’s work excelled them all in its thoroughness and total reliability.

The Contribution of Alfred Lewis Shoemaker

Alfred Lewis Shoemaker was born in Saegersville, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, in 1913. He attended public school in Saegersville, Northampton, and Slatington. In 1930, after graduating from Slatington High School, he enrolled in Muhlenberg College at Allentown, from which he graduated in 1934, after spending his junior year in Munich, Germany, as a member of the University of Delaware’s foreign study group. During the academic year 1934–35 he attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mt. Airy and the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester. The year 1935–36 he spent in graduate studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The next year he was Scholar in German at Cornell University. In the fall of 1937 he entered the University of Illinois, where he studied German and history and taught German classes. He received his Ph.D. under the direction of Professor C. A. Williams in 1940, with a dissertation entitled “Studies on