Conclusion

Jürgen Osterhammel describes the nineteenth century as the “age of reading,” emphasizing the widespread availability and cultural prominence of written materials during this period (1122). The significant increase in literacy rates across all societal classes, coupled with advancements in print technology, railway systems, and postal transport, played a crucial role in enabling the widespread dissemination of information. In this period, more than six million documented individuals migrated from the German states to the United States. Once arrived, these migrants found themselves in urgent need of information—about politics, housing, health, and the economy. In addition to practical guidance, they also sought comfort in familiar, formulaic, and easily digestible entertainment, often in the form of serialized sketches, novels, poetry, or humor. This demand contributed to the proliferation of newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages, including Russian, Italian, and Yiddish. Among these non-English publications, German-language newspapers stood out in both number and reach. Importantly, these papers were not only read within the United States. Through publishers, editors, reporters, and readers, a transatlantic network of communication emerged, connecting migrants to those they had left behind.

Du hast uns schon so oft mit Zeitungen u. dem schönen Album von der Chigagoer Ausstellung erfreut, […] Aus der letzten Zeitung sahen wir, daß Du Deinen Laden vergrößert hast. Er muß wunderschön sein, ach, könnten wir ihn nur sehen! […] Oh! wie viel Schönes hast Du gesehen! Ich erlebte es in Gedanken ordentlich mit. Durch Bücher u. Zeitungen kenne ich die ganze Welt. Wie würde ich mich freuen, könnte ich einmal ein Stück davon sehen.^[1]

These are the opening lines of a letter written by Johanna Schmid on June 9, 1895, in Kirchheim unter Teck to the cousin of her mother, Alexander von Höfeln, who lived thousands of miles away in Washington in the state of Illinois.^[2] As we can infer from the correspondence, Alexander von Höfeln provided his relatives with exciting insights into family circumstances. Not only did he convey the socio-economic conditions, but he also transported them into the fascinating cultural experiences that shaped life in the United States. Letters are an invaluable source for the history of German mass migration in the nineteenth century. From a multitude of letters from those who stayed behind, such as those from Johanna Schmid, it also becomes evident that not only letters crossed the Atlantic, creating transnational educational spaces of mobile lifeworlds, but also excerpts and complete editions of German-American newspapers. In Germany, the contents of letters were shared among family and friends—including the German migrant newspapers—but also circulated as part of a town’s gossip (Lehmkuhl 636).

German-American newspapers (re-)published reports on local, national, or international political events in Washington and Württemberg. Through listings, these publications informed about newly arrived “Germans.” Advertisements not only provided insights into the emerging consumer culture but also—as Johanna Schmid remarks in her letter—significantly contributed to Germans by effectively promoting their businesses, goods, and services. They also offered literary enjoyment to people of all ages through prose and poetry written in or translated into the German language. The publications played a crucial role in integrating migrants into their new society while simultaneously serving as an important connection to their diverse cultural roots, offering a sense of familiarity and connection with their origins. By reading, forwarding, and sharing the same texts that painted the journeys of multiple lives in urban and rural areas, migrants in the U.S. contributed to a collective practice of creating and reawakening a mutual sense of belonging to a German-American community.

While the extent and speed of information exchange nowadays on the internet are unprecedented, authors, editors, and readers have been exchanging, rewriting, or republishing information for centuries. However, it was the mass production of newspapers in the nineteenth century that significantly boosted this practice. Major announcements, such as the completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable, resonated through their network, as did information of a more everyday sensational and political nature. German-American newspaper editions and excerpts did not solely spread through familial networks across the Atlantic. The information exchange orchestrated by Alexander von Höfeln, akin to what has become common with the spread of computers and software, reflects a significant practice in nineteenth-century journalism. This practice involved editors collecting newspapers and “clipping out” relevant texts—poems, lists, jokes, news, and more—and reprinting them in their own publication. As Forty-Eighter Hermann Raster, editor of the New Yorker Abend-Zeitung (1851–1874)—a competitor of Anna Uhl Ottendörfer’s New Yorker Staats-Zeitung—at the time, remarked in a letter he wrote in November 1854 to his sister Sophie Raster:

You will understand that better if you happen to have seen any of the copies of the “New Yorker Abendzeitung”, a number of which I mailed to my brother-in-law recently. I hope at least some of them arrived safely. I am an editor, which in this case means that I, with the help of my assistant, write the entire paper, with the exception of those few articles which are reprints from German papers.^[3]

In his letter, Raster explained to his sister that he had little time to write more frequently, as he was constantly occupied with filling the newspaper’s pages—either by reprinting texts from Germany or translating content himself. After fleeing to the U.S., Raster first worked as an editor and journalist in New York before moving to Chicago, where he became the editor of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung (1848–1922). The reprinting of texts, which Raster referred to in the lines to his sister, became known as scissors-and-paste journalism. Texts were copied, reused, and further disseminated transregionally from various sheets, platforms, and sources. Editors welcomed this practice as it allowed them to quickly and diversely fill their publications with information from around the world and especially from the old homeland. “Immigrants could spend their lives largely in a German-speaking world if they chose to” and “[i]n some respects, it appears that German Americans lived in a parallel society, linguistically speaking” (Kamphoefner, Germans in America 113). The German-American press in these settlements contributed to this monolinguistic environment and, thanks to their translation efforts, readers were well-informed about national concerns and developments. In particular, smaller newspapers in rural areas of the United States had the opportunity to present their readers with news of political, economic, or criminal nature from the big cities through scissors-and-paste journalism. On a national scale, editors drew on a variety of other German-American newspapers through subscriptions or used American papers specifically translated for a German-speaking audience. This exchange was also legally accepted or tolerated, although the legal framework for the national and international press landscape was a subject of debate in copyright negotiations, especially concerning book publications. However, this practice was not merely about filling pages; rather, textual exchange functioned as a way to demonstrate participation in a shared media system. Reused texts allow us to study both the role of editors as influencers and the evolving tastes of readers.

There was long-standing agreement that the abundance of material made large-scale tracking of reprints practically impossible, generally, but especially regarding intensive textual modifications such as translations or deep editing. Before the digitization of newspapers, periodical research has faced challenges, due to the abundant, heterogeneous, and serial nature of these sources (Mussell 2). It seemed almost impossible for historians in the Humanities to search through, browse, or later even scroll through microfilms of hundreds or thousands of pages in various archives from Chicago, Illinois, to San Antonio, Texas, to identify “identical” passages. Previous research has largely overlooked scissors-and-paste journalism, especially in the case of the German-language press in the United States. Although the process itself was nothing new for research, in the pre-digitalization era of historical newspapers, empirical studies were lacking on the transcultural and transregional networks that supported, produced, or stabilized these newspapers in the nineteenth century. What texts of political, economic, or literary nature were selected by German-American editors? How did these texts change on their journey within the transregional communication network? Or who most commonly took over from others? In line with Cordell, this book emphasizes the importance of considering duplication, repetition, and what could be perceived as plagiarism, as they enable a fundamental shift in perspective for the examination of texts in mass media. The hybrid nature of migrant newspapers provides an opportunity to focus more on diverse social groups in the study of German-American history and to complement studies that have primarily focused on individual successful publications, locations, or male editors and owners. From a media and knowledge historical perspective, the interplay of social, political, demographic, ecological, and spatial information appears as a fascinating but hitherto untreated research task. The objective of the present study was, therefore, to fill this desideratum. The extensive reuse of texts in the form of syntactic repetition, translation, or adaptation in advertisements, jokes, and short stories, reveal the viral nature of media content in the nineteenth-century German-American press. This practice facilitated the widespread dissemination of both information and ideologies across vast geographical areas. Reused texts often contained modifications, reflecting the local editors’ perspectives and the needs of their readerships. Information was added, deleted, or modified. This phenomenon underscores the interconnectedness of the German-American press and its role in shaping and reflecting the community’s values and beliefs. The application of computational methods, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), text mining, and machine learning, enabled the identification and classification of reused texts at scale. These methods provide new insights into the circulation patterns and the types of content that were most frequently reused. The integration of digital tools into historical research has opened up new avenues for analyzing large datasets, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the media landscape and its evolution over time.

Migration and HERitage sought to illuminate the history of the German-American press from a gendered, predominantly female perspective—not by narrowing its scope to women’s publications alone, but by interrogating the broader representation of women in cultural memory. Dominant narratives of the past have long centered male-led enterprises, reinforcing a master narrative that grants interpretive authority to male actors while rendering women largely invisible. As Jan Assmann argues, cultural memory differs from individual memory not only in its physical and social dimensions but also in its cultural one (69–70). It is shaped and stabilized over long periods through images, texts, and rituals. These forms of remembrance are sustained through repetition, often spanning centuries or millennia. In the context of the nineteenth-century press, reprints of news, translations of novels, and parodies of poems serve as mechanisms of such repetition. By identifying texts that circulated widely, we gain insight into the textual diversity of the migrant press and into dominant topics that transcended regional and temporal boundaries. At the same time, close analysis of individual newspaper layouts reveals local variations, allowing for comparisons between urban and rural papers. These findings suggest that German-American newspapers were far from isolated; instead, they formed a transregional and transatlantic network that shared information and shaped public discourse across borders.

In this book, I have introduced two new concepts for the study of text reuse and gender in digitized newspapers: gender mining and compressed aesthetics. Gender mining refers to a variety of methodological steps to identify and analyze texts related to women, both authored by women and about women, within large corpora of digitized newspapers. This approach allows for a systematic examination of gender-specific portrayals across various genres, uncovering the often-overlooked contributions and representations of women in historical media. Gender mining moves beyond counting women in a dataset. Imagined as an interactive process, it integrates data-driven methods with close reading and layout analysis to find the women behind the pages. The second concept, compressed aesthetics, on the other hand, explores the interplay between topics (gender, race, and migration) within short stories and other literary forms in the German-American press. This concept examines how these narratives compress complex social issues into concise literary forms, providing a window into the cultural and ideological underpinnings of the time. By integrating these concepts, the book offers a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted ways in which gender and other social dynamics were constructed and communicated in the German-American press. As this study is the first to evaluate the scope and range of text reuse in the German-American press using a large corpus of digitized newspapers, it provides an impetus, in the words of Pigeon, to “encourage other scholars to inquire about the particular customs and habits of journalistic production beyond the metropoles and within specific regional publications” (“Scissors-and-Paste” 26).

Text reuse in the migrant press did not follow a straightforward logic. Geographically, content did not simply flow from urban to rural centers. As the example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin illustrates, both urban and rural papers produced translations, demonstrating mutual engagement in content creation. In literature, fiction by German women writers in the U.S. circulated widely not only due to the lack of restrictive copyright laws but also because readers favored familiar, even “unoriginal,” material. In advertising, both rural and urban papers featured numerous ads targeting women’s perceived inferiority and helplessness, often spreading misinformation about female bodies and miracle products. Even after such ruses were exposed in the American press, they persisted because advertising was the lifeblood of the migrant press.

Textual genres were not isolated: themes traversed news, fiction, ads, and lists. While editorials on women’s rights circulated among states, fiction by and about women increasingly appeared on front pages. Across genres, women’s absence, inferiority, or helplessness was a recurring theme, yet at the same time women emerged more visibly as editors, publishers, protagonists, and readers. Contradictory narratives, ranging from ridicule and abuse to victimhood, circulated alongside growing discussions of suffrage, education, and gender roles. These developments underscore women’s central role in the rise and transformation of the German-American press during the long nineteenth century, both as subjects and as agents of migration and media.

Digitization has made these analyses possible. It not only enables the aggregation of diverse newspapers but also allows for full-text search, which lets us experiment with new methods to trace the presence of women in digital archives and examine how they were represented, including the topics and discourses surrounding them. As Janine Solberg argues, female traces are much easier to find through OCR programs embedded in repositories, archives, and libraries (47). At the same time, there are significant limitations to this kind of research. First, issues of selection: fewer publications by women have been preserved and thus digitized. Second, many texts by women were published anonymously or under pseudonyms, which often changed over time as more women began to publish under their real names. In short, we can only find what we already know to search for. To overcome this, we first must study selection criteria and reveal data gaps (from missing sources to misleading metadata). Second, we must apply a range of digital methods—such as text reuse detection, network analysis, or genre classification—to reorder the archive. These data-driven approaches allow us to read historical sources differently, bringing to light patterns and presences that might otherwise remain hidden. The computational methods employed in this project aim to make digital tools accessible to Humanities scholars and, at the same time, to contribute to ongoing conversations in Digital History and Hermeneutics.

“[A] single machine-actionable dataset can spark many experiments, visualizations, interpretations, and arguments, both within the library and from outside researchers” (Cordell, “Machine Learning” 35). Mass digitization, the increasing interest in the transregional dissemination of texts in historical newspapers, and the need to expand the methodological arsenal have turned computer-assisted text reuse detection into an expanding field of research. Text reuse detection has its limitations. It primarily identifies reprints of syntactically similar texts—that is texts with minimal variation in wording and structure. It does not capture parodies, translations, or other forms of substantial textual transformation. Topic modeling, by contrast, can group together texts that share thematic concerns, regardless of syntactic similarity. Network analysis provides a different reading of the press based on its textual exchange, showing connections and disconnections of that network, but does not provide insight into textual diversity and richness. Frequency analysis of terms denoting women can generate hypotheses about the representation of both women and men across the entire corpus—especially when combined with text classification into specific genres. Close reading and layout analysis offer a way to zoom in, explore individual pages, and examine particular textual units within this larger ecosystem of exchange. Only through the combination of these methods can we make informed arguments about broader patterns in the corpus as a whole. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, no single method is sufficient on its own; rather, a combination of approaches is essential to uncover the complexity of historical newspaper content.

While it would have been possible to write a book on the transregional history of the German-American press by focusing solely on the most widely reprinted texts, such an approach would have offered limited insight. It might have quantitatively confirmed the significance of advertising and fiction for the economic survival of the German-language press, but it would have overlooked the reader’s experience. Most importantly, it would have failed to highlight the critical, yet often invisible, role that women played in shaping the migrant press. The recycling of media content in the German-American press exemplified the characteristics of virality, with different texts extensively and rapidly disseminated across vast geographical areas. Editors were not only engaged in the reuse of news articles from other German-language publications, but they also incorporated translated American texts into their publications. These texts encompassed a wide range of content, from anti-abolitionist women’s fiction, without necessarily obtaining the authors’ consent, to census reports, in which editors selectively omitted demographic information about women, thereby erasing a crucial aspect of the extensive and diverse knowledge available about women in those records, reinforcing their image as invisible citizens. While the most widely reprinted texts were not necessarily centered on women or authored by women, they still provide insights into gender dynamics. Texts that have the highest number of reuses and travelled the farthest and the longest, such as nationalistic poetry, displayed anti-monarchy sentiments. The popularity of these forms also sparked adaptions resulting in the dissemination of parodies narrated by women displaying feminist critiques of women’s rights in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Widely reprinted texts demonstrate a “feedback loop” (Cordell, “Reprinting” 418) revealing women’s discontent with men and drinking, challenging previous scholarship that portrayed German-American women as passive participants in the temperance movement. Moreover, numerous texts authored by men discussed gender disparities as responses to women’s advances in literacy, employment, and education. Within these publications, there emerged a growing number of German and German-American women as fiction and poetry writers. Due to the often anonymous or pseudonymous nature of their texts, however, the contributions of women in the mass media have been largely overlooked, resulting in their symbolic annihilation and exclusion from press historiography. Further analyses of the dataset processed with text reuse detection have unveiled instances where entire women’s pages were reused by other publications signaling that these pages were read by women across the country.

Together, these rural and urban, daily and weekly, Republican, Socialist, and Democratic newspapers have provided the opportunity to examine the different roles of women in the German-American press. The collection of these different newspapers, therefore, has expanded the research scope not only in offering gendered representations of the migrant press, but also in terms of geographical dimensions as it has not focused on publishing centers such as New York, St. Louis, Philadelphia, or Chicago, which have been mainly examined by previous scholarship. Such a model that has expanded the network to integrate rural areas has highlighted the significance of small-town and long-living papers that were more popular than has been recognized (Hobbs 9). While digitization has facilitated research on text reuse and provided new opportunities for analyses, digitized sources have limitations ranging from selection to search (Priewe 406–407). While this study has made significant contributions to our understanding of the German-American press and gender dynamics, it is not without limitations. The selection of newspapers was limited to those available in digitized form from Chronicling America, which may not provide a comprehensive depiction of the German-American press during the period studied. Important publications from major metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia were either not digitized (yet) or were behind paywalls, limiting the scope of the analysis. This selection bias might have led to an incomplete representation of the entire spectrum of German-American journalism. The dataset used in this study represents only a sample of the thousands of German-language periodicals published between 1732 and 1955. Consequently, the findings may not be fully generalizable to all German-American newspapers from this period. Many sources remain undigitized, and thus outside the reach of this research. This limitation underscores the need for ongoing digitization efforts to ensure a more comprehensive archive of historical newspapers that can be used for future studies. As of July 2024, several more papers including papers of record such as the Illinois Staats-Zeitung and its evening edition can now be found online on Chronicling America. Future studies could not only benefit from such additions but also explore the potential of combining datasets from different digital archives.

In addition, the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) varied significantly across different newspapers, leading to potential errors in text recognition and classification. This variability affected the accuracy of keyword searches and the detection of reused texts. Despite the advancements in OCR technology (including Large Language Models for post-OCR-correction), the challenges posed by older typefaces, poor print quality, and complex layouts of historical newspapers often resulted in inaccuracies, impacting the overall reliability of the data used in the study. Misinterpretations of characters, words, or entire sections of text can result in missed instances of text reuse or false positives. For example, the frequent misrecognition of the Fraktur typeface used in many German-language newspapers led to issues like confusing the letter “s” with “f,” thereby skewing the search results and data accuracy. Consequently, while OCR facilitated the large-scale analysis of digitized newspapers, its limitations necessitated additional verification and refinement steps to ensure the integrity of the findings regarding text reuse in the German-American press. Moreover, the computational models used for text classification encountered difficulties in distinguishing between certain genres, such as jokes and poems, due to their overlapping vocabulary and themes. This limitation highlights the need for further refinement of classification algorithms to improve their accuracy. Combining computational methods with more detailed qualitative analysis addressed these issues and provided deeper insights into particular eras such as the blurry lines between genres of a fictional and non-fictional nature.

Last but not least, the abundance of reused material and content for or by women made it impossible to close read all texts. Close reading, while invaluable for providing detailed and nuanced interpretations of individual texts, has inherent limitations, particularly when applied to large datasets like historical newspapers. This method focuses intensively on small text excerpts, analyzing language, structure, and meaning in depth, which can offer profound insights into specific passages. However, this microscopic focus can lead to a narrow perspective, missing broader patterns and trends across a larger corpus. In the context of studying the German-American press, close reading alone would be insufficient to capture the extensive network of text reuse and the widespread representations of gender. It is labor-intensive and time-consuming, making it impractical for examining thousands of newspaper pages. Additionally, close reading often relies on the subjective interpretations of the researcher, which can introduce further bias. Thus, while close reading is essential for understanding the intricacies of individual texts, it must be complemented by computational methods to achieve a comprehensive and balanced analysis of large-scale textual data. Given these limitations, this study has shown that periodical research benefits from a combination of analogue and digital sources as well as close and distant readings, in other words scalable readings. Combining quantitative distant reading with a classical text hermeneutical study of sources offers promising potential for deciphering and analyzing historical source collections (Althage 246). Since I consider quantitative analysis a complementary approach to qualitative methods, I see significant future potential in exploring the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for studying multilingual text reuse and intertextuality. Similar to text reuse detection or machine learning techniques, LLMs could support data-driven approaches by identifying patterns and clustering related articles, ultimately helping to create smaller, thematically focused corpora for further analysis.

Despite the limitations listed above, the main findings of this study highlighted the connections between newspapers through the widespread practice of reprinting, revealing a network of shared content that unified the German-American press. It emphasized the critical role of advertisements and short fiction in driving the growth and persistence of these newspapers, showcasing their significant contribution to maintaining readership and financial viability. Most importantly, it has shed light on the often overlooked and marginalized labor and readership of women in the German-American press. As pioneering feminist print culture scholar Margaret Beetham points out: “the politics of research in its best sense is always concerned with addressing a blind spot, an absence, or a repression” (147). By uncovering their hidden presence, this research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of German immigrant press history. Previous research has primarily focused on aspects such as the influx of immigration, editorial talent of the Forty-Eighters, and identity formation when examining the increase in German-American press publications in the second half of the nineteenth century. These studies, however, have largely overlooked the significant role of women as publishers, editors, writers, readers, and consumers, as well as the capitalist aspects of advertising and entertainment in the press. The presence of a substantial number of advertisements and short stories targeted at women suggests that they already constituted a large readership of the German-American press in the decades preceding the 1890s. This study, therefore, expands on Wittke’s foundational topics—the preservation of German language and culture, political engagement on issues like woman’s suffrage and prohibition—by highlighting additional themes such as women’s employment and education, their domestic roles, health and wellness, literary and creative contributions, gender ideologies, and advocacy for broader women’s rights. By integrating these topics, this research offers an understanding of the diverse and multifaceted discussions about women in the German-American press, thereby enriching the historical narrative with insights into gender-specific representations. Contrary to the notion that gendered pages and magazines emerged as a response to the discovery of a female readership around the turn of the nineteenth century, this study has argued that such publications should be viewed as a response to the already growing readership that had begun in the mid-1800s.

This book contributes not only to gender history in the context of German-American migration but also to the historicization of virality and news production. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, German-American newspapers did not organize their pages according to gender. Likewise, there was no clear distinction—either in content or layout—between advertisements, announcements, news items, or short stories. As Garvey notes, “papers provided troves of tidbits and factoids—household hints, information about word origins, geographic one-liners, and scientific or historical or agricultural items” (Garvey 7). While Garvey’s observations refer to the English-language press, German-language newspapers in the U.S. followed a similar format, placing facts, factoids, and fiction in close proximity. This raises a critical question: in the absence of consistent headlines or article divisions, were readers able to distinguish between the different truth claims presented to them? The answer is likely no. In terms of content, genre, and typeface, the layout of these newspapers more closely resembled the eclectic and fast-moving character of twenty-first-century social media feeds than the more structured design of twentieth-century German newspapers, in which the feuilleton was typically positioned below the line.

As stated in the introduction, Chronicling America has significantly enhanced the user experience through its new interface, introduced in August 2025. This update offers several notable advantages. First, the presentation has been improved with a dual-display mode, allowing users to view the machine-readable text (and assess OCR quality) alongside the scanned newspaper image. Second, the database has expanded to include a wider range of migrant communities, with a particular emphasis on the representation of women. Third, drawing on their own quantitative analyses, the team has developed a “Popular Topics” guide that enables users to explore prominent themes in the historical press. However, these curated topics primarily reflect the English-language press and are supported by only a limited selection of representative articles. Despite such limitations, Chronicling America remains a powerful testament to the multilingual and multicultural newspaper landscape of the United States since the eighteenth century. Their digitization efforts in regard to historical newspapers have sparked renewed interest in press history and have increasingly attracted scholars studying specific historical figures and events. The critique of digitization in this book—from selection biases to OCR inaccuracies—should therefore be seen as guiding concerns for scholars across the Humanities. I hope that the practices of digital source criticism discussed in Migration and HERitage will encourage the creation of more detailed datasheets documenting the politics of digitization.