Introduction

Nineteenth-century American press culture was shaped by a range of factors, including industrialized production, the rise of advertising, and mass migration. It was also influenced by evolving narrative styles—such as yellow journalism and New Journalism—which made news more sensational in order to appeal to an emerging society of literate readers.^[1] During this period of transatlantic mass migration, German-American newspapers were thriving. As the German-speaking readership steadily grew, hundreds of weekly and daily newspapers were established in both urban centers on the East Coast and rural areas in the Midwest.^[2] These papers played a crucial role in orienting migrants into their new society. They served as a vital link to their diverse cultural roots and offered a sense of familiarity and connection to their heritage (Wittke 2, 8). Changing patterns of mobility during this period transformed and accelerated the flow of information. While migrants from earlier periods had already begun publishing newspapers in the German language, the nineteenth-century’s combination of mass migration, advancements in print and communication technology, and increasing literacy helped produce a new transregional press and audience. Throughout the decades, German-American editors established a textual ecosystem of exchange which enabled migrants that had settled in different locations to have unprecedented access to the same stories. Despite their geographical dispersion, German-language newspapers worked as a press network, circulating and recirculating stories produced therein or adapted from other sources.

Migrant newspapers are “interesting from many points of view, but mainly from the light which its history and its contents throw open the inner life” of migrants and “their efforts to adjust themselves to a new cultural environment” (Park xix). The newspapers covered a wide spectrum of topics, from military conflicts in the German states to cultural celebrations in local American communities. At the same time, they increasingly functioned as discursive spaces in which notions of identity and belonging were articulated, contested, and renegotiated within the context of migration. One notable story—revealing both the connective patterns and inconsistencies of reprinting practices within the German migrant newspaper network centered on gendered notions of authorship and textual expression.^[3] On March 17, 1894, the daily Der Deutsche Correspondent (1841–1918), a German-language newspaper located in Baltimore—where 23.28% of the population was of German birth or descent—printed the story under the headline “Mann und Weib” (“Man and Woman”) (Arndt and Olson 188). The paper, with approximately 12,000 subscribers at the time, claimed that the main difference between men and women consisted in their approach to tasks, including the act of writing.^[4] Men, as the text explained, required specific conditions and materials to write, demanded silence, while writing, followed a linear and sequential approach, and typically concluded a letter with their signature, signifying the end of the conversation.^[5] Women, in contrast, were more adaptable and resourceful, capable of writing amidst distractions and noise, followed a more non-linear and spontaneous approach, and added a postscriptum (P.S.) after the signature, indicating the possibility of additional thoughts or information. While one could argue that the text merely aimed to describe observed labor differences between men and women, it carried an underlying message. By suggesting that the conversation remained unresolved, it implicitly reinforced the notion that women were incapable of reaching definitive conclusions. Such texts circulated not only to highlight perceived differences in gendered capabilities, but also to underscore that women lacked the rational judgment required for decision-making and were therefore deemed unfit to vote. “Just as today,” as Pim Huijnen puts it quite bluntly, “newspapers in the past have not been neutral entities” and whether driven by genuine (historical) interest or commercial motives, they have shaped memory culture nonetheless (i28).

The article, originating from an unidentified English newspaper, quickly spread through the emerging German-language press network. This was made possible due to various factors including innovations of the rotary press, linotype and stereotype machines, advancements in telegraphic, ship, and railroad systems, as well as editors’ professional networks and the widespread technique of content reuse known as “scissors-and-paste journalism” (Beals 1). The story’s distribution did not follow the paths one might expect, for instance, from Europe to the East Coast and then spreading westward. A few days earlier, on February 28, 1894, Die Freie Presse für Texas (1865–1918), a German-language daily based in San Antonio—a city with a significant German migrant population and an estimated 850 subscribers—published the story under the title “Männlich und Weiblich” (“Male and Female”).^[6] Other editors reused the story, but also altered the titles (Der Deutsche Beobachter [1869–1911], New Philadelphia, Ohio, on March 14, 1894: “Mann und Frau” [“Man and Woman”] with 1,008 subscriptions; Nebraska Staats-Anzeiger [1881–1901], Lincoln, Nebraska, on March 15, 1894: “Er und Sie” [“He and She”]; Nebraska Staats-Anzeiger, on March 22, 1894: “Mann und Frau: Ein kleiner Vergleich” [“Man and Woman: A Small Comparison”] with 2,700 subscriptions).^[7] The editors opted only for minimal alterations of the content, primarily focusing on the introductory lines. As British press historian Stephan Pigeon has pointed out, short, reused texts were usually “left largely intact apart from title changes and occasionally a rearrangement of the opening sentence or paragraph” (“Steal it” 30). Robert Hanschke and Edward Raine, editors in Texas and Maryland, appended editorial commentary noting that, while the observations may have held some truth, they were nevertheless lacking in courtesy toward women. The weekly Nebraska Staats-Anzeiger, a paper in Lincoln, Nebraska, initially asserted that the observations came from a reporter with years of marriage experience, thus positioning him as an expert in assessing gender disparities. A week later, however, its editor Henry Bruegmann deleted this aspect and explained that he had reused the story from the Hannoveranischer Kurier (1854–1944) in Germany. On the other hand, the weekly publication Der Deutsche Beobachter in Ohio, edited by Samuel R. Minnig, reported a different origin for the story, attributing it to a “Frauenkenner” (an expert on women) from a London newspaper.

Circulation data for these four German-language newspapers indicate that this anonymous piece on gendered divisions of labor—shared transregionally but accompanied by localized editorial commentary—reached at least 16,558 readers, not accounting for secondary and tertiary readership or additional reprints in other newspapers. This example seeks to illustrate that during the integration into a new environment, gendered discourses became an essential component of identity discourses, and these discourses become tangible precisely in the reuse and distribution of texts in the newspaper landscape. While these language modifications may seem relatively minor, they indicate that editors aimed to leave their distinctive mark on the material, even while reusing it. Thus, they offer significant insights into the contradictory nature of the story’s source and editors’ personal reflections and their attitudes towards the “transformation of gender roles” that posed a threat to ethnic identity towards the end of the nineteenth century, as highlighted by Allison Clark Efford (48–49).^[8] The differences and similarities between reprints offer a way of approaching and complicating an apparently seamless German-American ideology towards the end of the nineteenth century. This period was marked by a deep economic depression following the panic of 1893, increasing urbanization, the expansion of legalized racial segregation, and the rise of popular movements such as temperance and women’s suffrage. Influenced in part by the latter movement (see Bank), society found themselves grappling with what Elaine Showalter marks out as a “crisis in masculinity” (Sexual Anarchy 9).^[9] Women’s suffrage advocated for equal political rights and contended that women, being citizens, should possess an equal opportunity to engage in the democratic process and shape public policy. Women—both migrant and non-migrant—faced significant restrictions in economic, political, and legal spheres. Nevertheless, they increasingly secured access to education, entered the workforce in growing numbers, and began to build organizational influence. This opinion piece, therefore, falls into a time of late nineteenth-century American society, which—similarly to Europe—“continued to deny women equal rights on all levels,” as Carmen Birkle writes (13).

Although the reprinted story was not originally written with German migrant women in mind, it serves as an example to illustrate how editors reused content from European sources to address their own local matters of discussing the transformation of gender roles. We do not know if most migrant readers agreed or disagreed with these statements. However, the reused text provides insight into how gender-based personality traits were textualized, defined and massively shared through the press network. Sharing and commenting on such texts allowed for wider debates in newspapers on concerns related to diminishing male authority and power, as well as the expected behaviors and traits associated with authentic manhood and womanhood. According to Ryan Cordell, the act of reusing material from other sources during this period not only reflected the perceived interest in specific news but also intensified that interest through its extensive circulation, creating a “feedback loop” that he refers to as virality (“Reprinting” 418). In the case of this piece, it created a feedback loop that not only connected Europe and the U.S. but migrant communities in both rural American places and urban centers. The widespread dissemination of this piece leads to the identification of highly discussed topics. The editors’ adaptation, however, which shows “an engaged reading response,” can only be identified at the level of page composition (Pigeon, “Steal it” 28). This point introduces another crucial aspect of studying reprint culture, namely the integration of texts into the materiality of the newspaper and into various layouts, which also provide explanatory potential for discourse processes. Varying degrees of gendered discourse become apparent when one zooms in on the—digitized—newspaper page and considers localized factors such as the placement of the reused story within the layout and its relationship to adjacent news articles, advertisements, or fictional content. In Ohio, for example, the article was featured within what looks like a women’s page as it contained stories like “Die Oberflächlichkeit der Frau” (“Woman’s Superficiality”), a text which criticized the notion that women had to work without adequate preparation from education. Introduced in the 1890s, these women’s pages—gendered spaces within daily and weekly newspapers, sometimes explicitly labeled, sometimes not—were designed to create a foothold for women in the world of journalism, offering them visibility as readers, writers, and editors. Adapted from their American colleagues, German-American editors introduced women’s pages before newspapers in their homeland did. Visibility, however, was structured along different scales and degrees. The author’s gender, for instance, of “Die Oberflächlichkeit der Frau” remains uncertain, as the first name was abbreviated: G. Rosevalle. During this period, such name shortening of women writers, commonly employed by both authors and editors, was often a deliberate strategy to obscure identities (“Steal it” 33). While men’s names were also occasionally abbreviated, this practice occurred far less frequently than it did for women, reflecting broader gendered patterns of anonymity and visibility in the press. “Die Oberflächlichkeit der Frau” highlighted the resistance of men to embrace the evolving status of women while still adhering to the German Frauenideal (the ideal German woman).^[10] Many German migrants “did not see women’s suffrage as liberalism in action, but as fanaticism unleashed” which threatened women’s assigned role of preserving ethnicity as Kulturträgerin (cultural bearers) (Clark Efford 48) or Kuturbewahrerinnen (cultural preservationists) (Hofmann 397).

Minnig, the editor of this paper, was among the pioneers in introducing gender-specific sections, a clear acknowledgement of women as an important readership demographic. Many editors did not follow suit until nearly a decade later. Bruegmann in Nebraska took a different approach by addressing discussions about the role of women in society across multiple newspaper pages. These texts primarily depicted men’s resistance to accepting the changing status of women. On March 22, 1892, for instance, he featured an article on the front page (out of twelve) titled “Unsere Weiber” (“Our Women”) expressing strong discontent over the increasing professional involvement of women.^[11] He lamented that women were taking away men’s jobs, particularly as teachers, but even as newspaper publishers, editors, and reporters. According to press historian Monika Blaschke, German-American editors increasingly expressed concerns that the growing presence of texts focused on women, including those written by and about women, would lead to a decline in the quality of journalism, literature, and political discourse (Die Entdeckung 13). To expand this notion, Bruegmann additionally published pieces, rooted in misogyny, such as the one by Ferd. Schweizer titled “Frauenstimmrecht” (“Woman’s Suffrage) on page six. Schweizer’s text initially outlined arguments in favor of granting women rights to liberate them from their subordinate role as men’s “slaves,” only to ultimately conclude that women should not be afforded the same rights as men. During the Civil War era—an earlier moment of progressive reform—German-American editors had supported abolition. However, decades later, many of them still resisted the idea of granting women equal rights, even in an era increasingly shaped by emancipation movements (Clark Efford 48; Hofmann 391). They conveyed these views both through their own editorials and by reprinting opinions from other sources.

Nineteenth-century newspapers exhibited intricate layouts and featured a diverse array of texts on the same page, lacking thematic or structural coherence. Ironically, although Bruegmann neither introduced dedicated women’s pages nor supported women’s literacy, authorship, or employment—in fact, he published numerous texts opposing them—a comprehensive examination of the full issue, made possible by browsing the digitized newspaper pages, reveals a substantial amount of content by, for, and about women dispersed throughout the publication. Page six alone included obituaries (even published in Low German), job announcements by women, advertisements of products such as coats for women and children, and tonics for women’s health. These ads featured lengthy dramatic storytelling of various factors to convince women of their natural unhealthiness contributing to representations of hysteria, almost exclusively associated with women that had become an “epidemic” in the United States and Western Europe (Showalter, Hystories 16, 49). Furthermore, various fictional stories (“Die Tochter des Südens” [“The Daughter from the South”] without author attribution on page five) and poetical texts (“Wetter” [“Weather”] by Margarethe Treu on page two) were published within the pages, as well as a supplement titled “Der Sonntagsgast”(“The Sunday Guest”) featuring specifically short stories, jokes, and opinion pieces. As the emphasis of these exemplary textual pieces seeks to illustrate, nineteenth-century German-language newspapers could be messy objects with complicated layouts of different texts, but women consistently appeared visibly and invisibly as writers, were addressed in ads through texts and images, became subjects of discussion in news, or were memorialized in obituaries. Even though Bruegmann and editors who shared his political standpoint did not want to grant women equal rights, they reused sketches, stories, and novels authored by women and taken from other sources and disseminated advertisements to cure female weakness to both fill the pages, to cover the costs of newspaper production, and to meet the cultural expectations of a diversifying reading public.^[12]

Editors opposed shifting gender roles and the expansion of professional opportunities for women, yet newspapers nonetheless benefited from the growing presence of women as consumers, readers, and contributors. In the preface of his general overview of the German-American press published in 1957, Carl Wittke explains that over the course of his career he read “files” from more than 30 newspapers (vi). According to his analysis, during “the decades of its greatest prosperity” in the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers increasingly focused on American rather than German topics (270). As he points out, editors “expressed strong views on woman’s suffrage, prohibition, and personal liberty, and argued for the preservation of the German language, German social and cultural life, and the German press” (ibid.). As groundbreaking as this study is, it neglects, due to the imperfect tools available at the time, an empirical presentation of the culture of reprinting, nor does it provide space for substantive analyses of the mentioned topics, especially regarding women’s suffrage, German-American women as migrants, or women and their role in the newspaper industry in general. This book addresses these gaps. It examines the textual ecosystem of the German-American press by bringing diverse newspapers into dialogue and exploring multiple genres—ads, lists, poems, and more—to highlight the multimodal nature of the immigrant press as a cultural, economic, and political artifact. Migration and HERitage, therefore, contributes to a gender history of the German-American press by demonstrating that women played a significantly more dominant role in the press over the course of the nineteenth century than has been previously recognized. I argue that editors began targeting a female audience as early as the mid-nineteenth century—well before the emergence of dedicated women’s pages in the late nineteenth century.

What’s New(s)? Transregional Textual Circulation and Exchange

Several scholars have enriched the sense of the practices and significance of reusing material from other sources in the nineteenth century. Scholars such as Meredith McGill use the term “reprinting” to refer to the process of reproducing printed material, such as books, documents, or artwork in the U.S. and advocates for examining what was reprinted—often, widely, or over and over—to gain insights into the values of editors and readers during that period (American Literature, 2–3). Scholars such as Melodee Beals, in contrast, who study reprinting in the context of the British and Australian press, use “scissors-and-paste journalism” as a term to describe the physical act of editors cutting out sections of printed articles from one source and pasting them onto another surface. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the mass press and the transregional circulation of information raised new questions about who held the rights to copy and reproduce content. Stephan Pigeon, who examines the editorial labor in British newspapers and magazines, describes reprinting as a “three-step process of cut, revise, and paste without full acknowledgement or permission,” and provocatively calls it “steal it, change it, print it” (“Steal it” 26). The period was marked by diverse developments of copyright enforcements, which were part of larger discussions about property rights including intellectual property. Laws were, however, not as strictly defined during that time and they differed among nations. Newspaper editors were able to profit from these vague legislations. While scissors-and-paste journalism resulted in news being spread fast and extensively, “[a]t its best,” it “was part of the liberal outlook for a free trade in news and information” and “[a]t its worst, it was part of the newspaper and periodical press’s harsh capitalist modernization” (Pigeon, “Scissors-and-Paste” 12). Apart from the economic conditions, Pigeon highlights the cultural relevance of reused stories. Even though texts were extensively recycled, they were culturally translated even within the same language to meet the expectations of different audiences (“Steal it” 25).^[13] In the context of the American press, book historian Ryan Cordell introduces the twenty-first-century neologism of virality to study the nineteenth-century press. According to Cordell, texts—ranging from hard news to poems—circulated rapidly and extensively in the industrial age, thereby creating, sustaining, “or sometimes sever[ing] network connections” (“Viral Textuality” 32).^[14] Reprinting culture was not only flourishing because of absent or vague legislations, but also because readers were interested in stories from other places. Cordell argues that we should see nineteenth-century print culture through “a viral theory of textuality,” which “foregrounds circulation and reception, describing not static textual objects but instead the ways texts moved through the social, political, literary, and technological networks” (ibid.). He argues that duplication, repetition, and practices that might today be dismissed as plagiarism must be reconsidered, as they offer a critical shift in perspective for examining not only circulation but also obscure texts, and lesser-known authors. Instead of solely emphasizing originality and novelty, Cordell’s approach highlights the significance of textual similarity and encourages a critical reorientation in both literary and press history (ibid.). As Claudia Stokes points out for the entire publication landscape (and not exclusively newspaper literature), “originality was by no means an intrinsic literary value but was instead perceived with suspicion: originality often connoted irregularity, sensationalism, and vulgarity” (Old Style 1). “Novelty became a cardinal aesthetic virtue of the twentieth century, but in the nineteenth the old and the familiar were valued for their history, durability, and wholesomeness” (2).

Despite the central role that reprinting played in the production and dissemination of news in the nineteenth century, there have been few efforts to systematically trace its history within the context of the German-American press. As an overview of German-American press history, Carl Wittke’s The German Language Press in America (1957) remains seminal. However, even though he highlights that texts “made the rounds” (224) or “were brazenly lifted from other sources” (189), he does not allocate further space to this production and reception-historical phenomenon in his analysis. There has been a lack of extensive investigations into these exchanges, with some studies offering hypotheses without empirical evidence or focusing on limited time periods. Instead, scholars have focused on the historical actors themselves, predominantly men, including their political and economic contributions rather than analyzing texts other than editorials (see Shore et al.). They have written histories centered around notable editors such as Carl Schurz (Detroit Post, Detroit, and Westliche Post, St. Louis), Wilhelm Rapp (Baltimore Wecker, Baltimore, and Illinois Staats-Zeitung, Chicago), or Heinrich Boernstein (Anzeiger des Westens, St. Louis), who predominantly migrated in the 1840s. Moreover, less attention has been given to editors who arrived before or by the end of the nineteenth century (Bergquist, “German-American Press” 138; “The Val J. Peter Newspapers” 118). Numerous studies have emphasized the influential role of editors in shaping public opinion on party politics. Steven Rowan, for example, has translated and edited the sections of Heinrich Boernstein’s memoir that recount his years in the United States, underscoring Boernstein’s accomplishments as a publisher, his support for Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party’s anti-slavery platform, and his service as a U.S. Army officer during a pivotal moment in Civil War-era St. Louis. In one of the most recent contributions, Julius Wilm examines how the Westliche Post—formerly edited by Carl Schurz—served as a vehicle for disseminating Schurz’s views on his harsh policy of forced assimilation targeting Indigenous communities during his tenure as the 13th United States Secretary of the Interior. These studies emphasize the role of the immigrant press in shaping identity through political, religious, or social affiliations, rather than exploring the media-historical aspects. Most studies have focused on individual publication locations in urban areas such as Chicago (see Hinrichs; Keil), St. Louis (see Rowan, “The German Press”), or New York City (see Conolly-Smith, “Transforming”). This narrow focus on urban settings has also resulted in overlooking the immigrant press’ presence in rural areas and the broader transregional network of editors and readerships. While these works illustrate the strong interest of scholars in the German migrant printing sphere, historian Wolfgang Helbich summarizes the archive(s) of German-American newspapers in his overview article about research on German-American migration as “terra incognita” (399).^[15]

In addition, most works have only scratched the surface, specifically when it comes to the allegedly non-political—cultural—content of the press. According to Wittke, the “only distinctive feature of the German press, compared with typical American dailies, was the serial story and the section devoted to belles-lettres, known as the feuilleton” (217). Despite this claim, historians including Wittke have rarely studied the supposedly non-factual content of the newspapers. “For if the novels, stories, and poems published in the German-American press are its one distinctive feature,” as Brent O. Peterson argues, “one would expect an exhaustive analysis of their content and function” (“The Political” 42). Surprisingly, literary scholars have also overlooked newspapers as valuable repositories of popular culture, even though German migrants actively engaged with a diverse range of literature (Popular Narratives 88). The few studies that exist mainly focus on serialized mystery novels written by men in the middle of the nineteenth century (see Shore, “The Mysteries”; Stein), while the rich collection of other fictional and poetical works published in newspapers largely remains overlooked. There are several reasons for this disregard. On the one hand, “[n]ewspapers, literary history has told us, hold inferior, unimportant writings,” notes Karen Roggenkamp (xv). This viewpoint has received additional support from historians who propagate narratives of Kulturlosigkeit (lack of culture). As Kamphoefner asserts, even though “[t]here were also significant German cultural contributions in theater and particularly music,” there was “surprisingly little literature of quality authored in the German language” (Germans in America 4). Literature that is not perceived as high-quality—often dismissed as lowbrow or bad fiction—has received relatively little scholarly attention, despite its widespread readership and its significant role in expanding the nineteenth-century print sphere. Stokes makes critics of the twentieth century responsible for this misconception of American literature. As she writes: “Over the last century, scholars have attended primarily to the singular, the atypical, and the new, and we have forgotten that, in the nineteenth century, the borrowed, the familiar and the traditional provided trusted markers of quality and discernment” (Old Style 2). Stokes’s research highlights the role of unoriginality in the work of white women writers and writers of color, showing how they often employed it to demonstrate reverence for literary tradition and to assert their legitimacy before a public audience (4). Morag Shiach emphasizes the importance of critically interrogating discourses on popular culture, which are frequently shaped by assumptions not only about gender, but also about class, authenticity, cultural value, and narratives of cultural decline (40).

The occurrence of fiction, particularly, is a strong indicator for a female readership (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 25).^[16] Women became a large reading group in the second half of the nineteenth century boosting the publication of many new newspapers, journals, and magazines. They constituted at least 40% of the German-American population between 1870 and 1910 (16). Even though German-American press scholars, such as Wittke in his 1957 overview, already acknowledge the link between women’s purchasing power and their representation in the press, no in-depth analyses have been conducted on this subject. The few studies that focus on women as actors in the history of German-American migration use women’s pages or women magazines (see chapter 1), which are relatively “easy” to identify due to their titles containing the word “Frauen” (women). The examples of the aforementioned 1894 viral story, however, demonstrate that discussions about women were not confined to gender-specific sections of the newspaper. The main objective of this study, therefore, is to examine how gender—beyond women’s pages—impacted the culture of reprinting in the German-American press in the long nineteenth century.^[17] This book shows that women were targeted as readers before 1890, which in turn contributed to the growth and significance of German-language publications.

This observation falls into larger discussions about women and their representation in the historiography. This omission is a systemic problem, one that Joan Wallach Scott already pointed out in 1996: “Feminists have long criticized traditional accounts of the past excluding women; they have provided supplements to existing histories, and replacements as well. […] They have argued that attention to women would not only provide new information but expose the limits of histories written only from the perspective of men” (12). In the context of media history, Gaye Tuchman refers to this neglect as “the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media” (3). Furthermore, Blaschke argues that the contributions of German migrant women to press history have not only been overlooked, but also subjected to one-dimensional assessments, with men and women being assigned distinct and differentiated spheres of interest (Die Entdeckung 25). Compared to men, only few women were officially owners and chief editors. But diving into the textual content, as I demonstrate in this book, one begins to sketch the “invisible work” of women, a term coined by Arlene Daniels in 1987 (403). Texts centered on or written by women featured on all pages. Identifying women writers in the press, however, is difficult for several reasons. First, the mass material of newspapers makes it a daunting task to read across pages and identify women’s names. Second, given the fact that the majority of German-American editors did not want to grant women the same rights, texts written by women were often published authorless, under pseudonyms, or names were abbreviated. In addition, women’s materials were less preserved in archives. For some women that can be identified on the newspaper page, Blaschke has taken the initiative to start bringing their contributions to the forefront by highlighting the challenges and opportunities inherent in their career paths (Die Entdeckung 317–354). She has compiled a bibliography featuring over 130 German-speaking women who edited women’s pages and made significant contributions through short stories, poems, and essays (355–364). However, broader biographies of these women and their lives have yet to be written.

Migration and HERitage extends this approach by showing that women held significant roles within the German-language press and actively contributed to the rise of the press, well beyond the pages and publications dedicated to them. Women’s involvement encompassed owning and editing newspapers (see chapter 1 and 2), writing texts about politics, history, or everyday life (chapter 3 and 6), and shaping the overall landscape of the immigrant press in advertising (chapter 5) and entertainment (chapter 4 and 6). While some women’s contributions can be easily identified through their explicit mentions as authors, editors, or owners, there are instances where deeper investigation is required to uncover their presence. These hidden markers can include the use of terms like “us” in texts discussing women or the need to unpack the identities behind pseudonyms or abbreviations, which were adopted by the authors themselves or by the editors (Pigeon, “Steal it” 34). The pseudonyms and abbreviations are numerous, but they very often lead to dead ends. This illustrates both writers’ and editors’ role in disguising, that is in rendering them invisible, which Dorothea Stuecher summarizes in her book title as Twice Removed in the context of German-American women. They witnessed their work circulating throughout the newspaper press without receiving fair compensation for their efforts. Despite their significant contributions, thousands of writers have received minimal attention, partly due to their limited visibility in historical records. It is no surprise that scholars often gravitate towards extensively researched literary or political figures who also contributed to newspapers and periodicals, neglecting the lesser-known people.

The Promise and Pitfalls of Digitized German-American Newspapers¶

Beyond demonstrating the transregional influences of reprinting that shaped and contributed to the flourishing of the German immigrant press, this book makes a methodological contribution to Digital History and Hermeneutics. It shows how using digitized newspapers with computational methods can reveal an important cultural phenomenon that the provisions of traditional archival technologies are ill equipped to unveil. Prior to the digitization of historic newspapers, conducting a systematic analysis of the practice of reprinting across multiple locations was not feasible, despite its long-standing recognition as a common practice (Paju et al. 254). Working with newspapers was often daunting, as the vast amount of material made it challenging to find relevant information, with the time invested often outweighing the research value (Oberbichler et al. 226). Fortunately, scholars in industrialized countries now have access to a growing number of newspapers thanks to the digitization efforts undertaken by libraries and archives in recent decades (Priewe 403). Digital newspaper archives support transregional and comparative studies as they merge papers from different places and times. They allow researchers to browse through the pages and facilitate approaches such as “comparative periodical studies” (Thacker 20). In 2006, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes predicted in The Rise of Periodical Studies that digital archives and methods will spark renewed interest in periodical studies (517).

In this study, I use digitized newspapers from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database that brings together periodicals from different state digitization efforts. As of August 2024, the digital newspaper portal Chronicling America provides free access to more than 22 million pages of historic American newspapers, spanning from 1770 to 1963.^[18] While the idea of digital surrogates of newspapers may seem promising, it is important to approach them with caution due to concerns related to selection, presentation, quality, and search capabilities (see chapter 2). As regards selection, for instance, Ben Fagan points out that the English-language newspapers in Chronicling America disproportionately focus on newspapers that catered to the dominant white, middle-class readership. Newspapers run by African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women have been largely excluded (11). Although this observation presents a somewhat negative view of digitization, highlighting these inequalities has prompted revisions in the selection criteria to address these issues. Consequently, Chronicling America has responded to these critiques. The Library of Congress and the National Digital Newspaper Program have changed guidelines to prioritize not only the newspapers of record, but also to collect sources that represent a diversity of historical actors including minoritized groups. A complete digital representation of any periodical collection, however, will always be out of reach. As Paul Fyfe points out, examining the history of preservation and transformation reveals that not all papers have been (or will be) digitized, some no longer exist as they were not collected in the first place, and others have been wrongfully classified or remain hidden in physical archives (546). The present study, using 18 German-language newspapers derived from the Chronicling America database, therefore, is not a complete representation of the German immigrant press. It is also fair to query whether this research is representative of the German-American press. The corpus does not provide a complete representation of the German-American press of this time. Many sources are not (yet) digitized.

What has been digitized influences the—new—questions we can ask with digitized historical sources and computational methods. Although the dataset enables transregional studies as exemplified in the four newspapers that reprinted the 1894 story on gender roles, it has gaps that adversely affect my work that I will address in detail in chapter 2. First, only two of these newspapers were owned by women.^[19] Second, publications from press hubs like New York or Chicago are missing (due to politics of digitization), while states like Ohio or Pennsylvania are overrepresented. Third, it only features newspapers of the three states that belong to the German Belt, despite the high presence of German-language newspapers in this region. The German Belt refers to a geographic region where there was a significant concentration of German-speaking migrants. It is primarily located in the Midwest, particularly in states such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, which had large numbers of migrants during the nineteenth century (Kamphoefner, Germans in America 66). To draw connections and make comparisons, I have integrated German-American papers of record from Philadelphia and New York into this study. However, since some of them have either not been digitized or can only be found behind a paywall, the reader will unfortunately not find any links to the source material in contrast to the ones taken from Chronicling America. Despite these shortcomings, the dataset is suitable for production and reception-historical inquiries. As I aim to demonstrate in the present study, the advantage of the dataset lies primarily in its inclusion of newspapers from both urban and rural areas, different years, and political orientations. They are not necessarily the ones from big cities that have been predominantly examined by scholarship so far. These papers mostly consist of daily and weekly newspapers that focus on specific places in the U.S. rather than specific groups, as suggested by titles such as Apothekerzeitung (Pharmacist Newspaper), Bierbrauerzeitung (Brewer Newspaper), Geschichtsblätter (History Sheets), Der Pfälzer in Amerika (The Palatinate in America), or Neue Preussische Zeitung (New Prussian Newspaper). In addition to the structured and unstructured data from the digitized newspapers of Chronicling America, my work benefits from the (non-digital) bibliography of German-language publications by Karl J. R. Arndt and May E. Olson, which has been revised multiple times since its first publication in 1961. This work is a significant contribution to ethnic press research because metadata ranging from information about editors to circulation statistics from more than 2,000 newspapers and magazines from the eighteenth to the twentieth century were manually collected for it. Their work has become crucial as metadata in the Chronicling America database can be misleading and, in some cases, is wrong. For the publisher of the Deutsche Beobachter, for instance, it continuously lists Andreas Nägeli, even though it was founded and published first by Frederick Walter before being bought by Samuel Minnig—one of the pioneers who introduced women’s pages in rural regions.

Next to digitization politics, the machine-readable text created with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software also has disadvantages. What users see in front of them when reading a digital source, as James Mussell points out, is not a historic newspaper, but an image that, in many cases, is intended to simulate the printed medium through its presentation and specific uses (24). Mussell and other scholars including Bob Nicholson and Ian Milligan argue that researchers must acquaint themselves with the transition of newspapers into electronic data, as this transformation resulted in changes to the nature and content of the information provided by these sources. Consequently, the quality of the digitized data varies significantly, which can be attributed to differences in the sources, which evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, as well as variations in the digitization processes carried out by different actors using different software applications (Tworek 335). Even though OCR creates keyword-searchable text that makes it possible to browse through these large collections of newspapers, the quality of machine-readable data is prone to errors.^[20] Working with old script and complex layouts presents challenges for machine learning applications such as OCR to accurately identify all letters (see chapter 2). In contrast to American newspapers that were printed in Antiqua, German-language publications were printed in Fraktur. When dealing with Fraktur, the German typeface of newspapers, the letter “s,” for instance, is frequently misinterpreted as “f.”^[21] Such examples of misclassification can have implications for search results. In addition, genres and their layouts impact OCR quality. Advertisements, for instance, have complex layouts within the page and contain many numbers, which makes them prone to OCR errors. It is difficult to generalize about the quality of the OCR data in Chronicling America since it “is so variable that any summary would be largely inaccurate, even for a specific title,” as Beals and Bell conclude (12). These limitations must be considered when conducting a full-text search in any digitized newspaper archive.

Text Reuse Detection, Genre Classification, and Gender Mining¶

Despite these pitfalls, the ability to search through more data than ever before in digitized newspapers via keyword searches has transformed researchers’ work. Millions of digitized copies, along with their machine-readable text generated by OCR are available through numerous online platforms. While this represents a significant advancement in terms of preserving and accessing documents, there is still much to be done to enable comprehensive and sophisticated access to the content of these digital resources beyond keyword queries. As historian Estelle Bunout argues, the commonly employed method of keyword search, widely used for analyzing digitized newspaper collections, may not be the most effective approach for identifying widely reprinted texts (283).^[22] While “[k]eyword search can help scholars find copies of texts they know to search for,” “it cannot make inferences about widely reprinted texts lost to scholarly bibliographies” (Cordell, “A Larger View of Digital American Studies”).

The digitization of newspapers has led to the emergence of text reuse detection (TRD) as a growing field of research (Paju et al. 254). In contrast to keyword search, TDR is a text mining method to identify no particular words, but instead samples of repetition from sentences to entire texts or paragraphs. “TRD identifies repeated text segments (or passages) and groups them automatically into text reuse clusters” (Düring et al. 1). In the Viral Textsproject, David Smith developed an algorithm designed to compare newspapers from Chronicling America, identify similar passages of text, extract them, and organize them into a new database. It was crucial for the algorithm to focus on sequences of words to be able to handle “cultural heritage as digital noise,” in other words, OCR errors (Jarlbrink and Snickars 1228). For this study, the open-source software PASSIM (D. Smith et al.) was used to detect text reuse. 44,750 clusters of text reuse from 18 German-language newspapers across 13 states were identified using this n-gram based method (see chapter 3). The Chronicling America corpus is unsegmented, that is, texts are not separated or classified into genres since the entire page was scanned and digitized as one single unit. Therefore, text reuse detection was made on the entire page including all different kinds of content types from news and poems to advertisements and announcements.^[23] The derived dataset consists of thousands of individual duplicated texts, each of which has been reused multiple times, ranging from two to several hundred instances. The mere fact that a text has been reused, however, does not necessarily hold practical or theoretical significance in all cases. Numbers alone do not efficiently represent popularity or cultural significance. Cordell, however, argues that when frequency, in other words, looking at highly reused texts, is considered as a focal point for scholarly investigation, it generates a diverse and decentralized set of bibliographies that bring attention to understudied or overlooked textual forms of everyday reading and writing (“Reprinting” 432). According to Cordell, reprints may appear as meaningless excerpts or mere fillers (“Viral Textuality” 47). However, when these selections are identified, grouped, and analyzed as a collective corpus by machine, as he argues, they transform into essential indicators of the print culture of the time uncovering the key priorities, concerns, and sources of entertainment of this period (48). “Studies of copy-paste journalism” or “the dissemination of specific discourses, and similar phenomena therefore all stand to benefit from TDR” (Düring et al. 6).

With text reuse, a term more associated with natural language processing (NLP), I do not only want to emphasize the digital component of this study. Instead, I use text reuse because it functions as an umbrella term to encompass the diversity of reprinting culture in the German-American press. It includes both reuse from the perspective of the mere repetition of words, that is, the reprint of a news article in several outlets to the transformation of a poem into a translation or the incorporation of literary devices and stylistic figures into advertising texts. In the Humanities, the study of analyzing these connections is more broadly known as intertextuality. This concept similarly covers a wide range of phenomena of intertextual relations such as “quotations, plagiarism, translations, parodies, paraphrases, illusions, content-related and stylistic references, which may have been used both consciously and unconsciously,” as Doris Gruber points out (263–264). According to Renate Lachmann, “[w]riting is both an act of memory and new interpretation,” embedding each new text into cultural memory (“Mnemonic and Intertextual” 301). Authors—and similarly, as this book shows, editors who reuse material—draw on texts from their own and other traditions quoting, paraphrasing, alluding to and reflecting a culture’s understanding of memory. Intertextuality, as Lachmann continues, captures this dynamic exchange, showing how a text-based culture constantly rewrites and redefines itself through its signs. “To uncover these processes, we must widen our view by including the textual and content-related sources of the mnemonic contents and by focusing on the relation between previous and subsequent texts” (Henke 971).

The computational analysis of intertextuality is still a very young field of research, and no standards or workflows have yet been established (Gruber 268). This book, therefore, is an experiment in TDR, aiming not only to highlight its possibilities but also to critically assess its limitations as clearly as possible. The sheer volume of text reuse data makes it impractical to thoroughly read or browse through manually. To further analyze text reuse while accounting for genre diversity, I employed machine learning techniques. The initial objective was to partition the extensive dataset into two distinct categories: “fiction/poetry” and “non-fiction.” However, as will be shown throughout the study, differentiating between the two can be difficult giving the nature of the nineteenth-century German-American press and the blurry lines between fact and fiction. Excerpts of poems were often embedded within news articles, while texts that appeared to be factual reports frequently turned out to be fictional fabrications. Therefore, I decided to not use a binary classification but instead experiment with further approaches to represent the diversity of content that was reused within the same newspaper or in different locations and at different times (see chapter 4). Through the integration of various steps, including unsupervised (topic modeling and clustering) and supervised machine learning (manual annotations in a topic model browser), the workflow was expanded to classify these texts into ten different categories: hard news, advertisements, lists, factual texts, announcements, poems, jokes, short stories, novels, and religious texts.^[24] Most texts were computationally classified as news (22,068 reuse clusters), ads (9,142), and short stories (2,818), indicating that reused content in the corpus encompassed not only informational but also entertainment-oriented material. In addition, machine learning was useful not only to examine the relationship between text reuse and genre, but also to re-cluster content that had initially been separated due to substantial editorial modifications (or OCR noise).

Figure 1: Screenshot of Chronicling America’s updated interface (as of August 2025), illustrating the dual-presentation mode “Image w/Text,” which juxtaposes OCR text and page image with highlighted search terms.

The biggest challenge in this study was to grapple with the question of how to computationally operationalize gender. The highlighted term “gender” in figure 1 illustrates not only the challenges of working with unsegmented OCR data but seeks to humorously underscore the difficulty of translating a complex social construct like gender to the computer.^[25] The text, a recipe for “Roast mutton with fresh cucumbers” does not explicitly discuss gender roles. Instead, the highlighted term refers to a German adjective “stei-gender” (“rising”)—which was split into two separate parts as a result of a line break.^[26] As this keyword-search example illustrates, locating texts for, by, and about women is neither simple nor straightforward; it requires a combination of methodological approaches. I, therefore, use the term gender mining to describe the integration of text reuse detection, machine learning, close reading, and cultural history—while emphasizing that my analysis of text reuse is primarily conducted from a gender perspective. Through frequency analyses (of terms such as Frau, Weib, Dirn [woman], Fräulein [miss], or Mädchen [girl] in each—as well as comparable terms referring to men) and close readings of reprint clusters, I found that information about women was disproportionately prominent in jokes, advertisements, and short stories. Information about men, in contrast, seemed to be more prevalent in novels and poems. In news and lists, I did not find any significant deviations related to gender, which indicates that gender representation was not a distinguishing feature from a genre perspective. However, male names—that is, with no abbreviations—were more frequently mentioned across all genres compared to female names.

As this shows, computational analysis expands perspectives and brings attention to otherwise unnoticed aspects. Even though these findings reveal that there is a connection between gender and genre, texts that offer material to study these connections cannot be identified through frequency analyses of gendered vocabulary lists alone. As Laura Mandell emphasizes, it is essential to interpret numbers in context, specifically, when researching women, as they alone do not capture the full reality of women’s lives (5). Since text reuse detection methods focus solely on textual aspects, they often overlook the importance of visual properties. Integrating the interface of Chronicling America, however, enables the study of the interplay of image, text, and layout.^[27] Since the classified dataset includes the links to the pages in Chronicling America, a careful examination of the digitized images was possible. This aspect holds particular significance for the study of text reuse and gender, as the layout including the position of content provides additional insights beyond the textual properties alone (Kress and Van Leeuwen 181). Certain newspapers and issues incorporated fiction, poetry, or news on their first pages, while others reserved them for the final page. Some papers extensively featured short stories and advertisements across all pages, while others confined them to the last one. Layout analysis became additionally relevant for the study because it allows me to show that women featured beyond the women’s page. By incorporating the analysis of layout, a second advantage emerges: the ability to study the diverse reused visual images depicting women.

The presence of various fictional and non-fictional textual forms in the German-American press, interspersed in a seemingly chaotic manner, challenges the notion of a linear approach to writing, as suggested for men in the viral opinion piece mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. By examining newspapers with varying subscription numbers, geographical reach, and periodicity, Migration and HERitage not only presents a history of gender debates within the immigrant press but also offers diverse strategies for locating and analyzing such controversies in digitized newspaper collections beyond traditional keyword searches.

Structuring Migration and HERitage¶

Changes in perspective—through zooming in and out, from a bird’s-eye view to close-up detail—give rise to new forms of intertextual analysis (Armaselu and Fickers 7). Given the range of methods developed, adapted, and refined over the course of this doctoral project, I chose not to structure the book according to the conventional divisions often found in Digital History (adapted from computer science)—such as data, theory/method, and analysis. Instead, each chapter introduces a new computational method, ranging from digitization to text mining, to engage critically with digital sources, interfaces, and tools, while encompassing a wide array of textual forms, including news articles, jokes, novels, and lists. The book integrates both quantitative and qualitative readings of databases, visualizations, and digital archives. This mixed-methods approach is often referred to as scalable reading, a concept coined by Martin Mueller (Weitin 1–2). Scalable reading emphasizes that computational analysis is not limited to distant reading—interpreting graphs or network diagrams—but involves multiple forms of engagement, including, for instance, navigating reprint clusters through a digital archive interface. As a scalable approach (statistical, iterative, and exploratory), I combine quantitative methods to ask what kinds of texts were reused and how often, with qualitative methods to explore why and in what form they were reused. Applied to the press system, this approach makes it possible to explore connections across newspapers from different angles, moving between factual and fictional content, and examining how such material was inscribed into the fabric of the printed page.

Chapters 2–4 introduce Chronicling America, including its digitization policies and an interface critique, followed by an exploration of text reuse detection for identifying reprinted content and the application of machine learning techniques for genre classification. These chapters aim to reveal texts that had a high frequency of repetition and geographic or temporary circulation but also demonstrate instances of close readings to show where—and how—women were excluded or portrayed through editorial practices. The second section of this book (chapters 4–6) primarily concentrates on the analysis of advertisements and short fiction, which exhibit the highest frequency of reprinting in the dataset and tend to feature an overrepresentation of women. Often overlooked in scholarly discussions (Wevers 228), advertisements as sources become particularly significant when analyzing their implications for women. Ads that were transregionally shared reveal that German-language newspapers targeted women as readers before the 1890s. These texts exemplify the remarkable flexibility of this form, as advertisers and editors effectively employed German branding to endorse products targeted at mothers, as well as perpetuated stereotypes of the ideal woman, reinforcing notions of innate female weakness and confinement. Ads allowed women to gain more information about motherhood or womanhood. At the same time, the system exploited this hunger for knowledge about reproductive and sexual health leading to the rise of disinformation about bodies or to clearly define different gender roles by publishing, republishing, and commenting on what counts to be a woman. Nevertheless, both advertising and fiction gave women more visibility on the pages. The depictions of women in fiction, however, were characterized by a complex and contradictory nature. On the one hand, the German-language press engaged readers with compelling narratives about heroines and migration-related tragedies, illustrating how prose served to construct and circulate ideas of gender and migration. On the other hand, despite editors’ public objections to granting women additional rights, their publications also encouraged political engagement by exposing the failures of the patriarchy and advocating for institutional reform. It is difficult to determine whether readers were aware of the different claims to subjectivity and objectivity made by fiction and non-fiction. Within the realm of advertisements and short (new/s) stories, these types emerged as popular forms in the nineteenth century, catering to women as both sources of information and sources of entertainment. Given the limitations of prose and the scope of this book, there are numerous stories I was unable to include. The stories I have chosen—encompassing a mix of fact, fiction, and factoids (Garvey 7)—offer diverse responses to the progress of women and reflect the chaotic nature of the nineteenth-century press, which I portray in line with what Cordell has described as the Facebook of the industrial age (Lichterman).

The chapters do not follow a strictly chronological structure. I move between decades—reflecting the fact that many texts circulated not only over days or weeks, but across decades. The selected timeframe (1830–1914) is aligned with that of the Oceanic Exchanges project, allowing for methodological and comparative continuity.^[28] It covers significant political, social, and economic changes that impacted the emergence and eventual decline of the German-language press. The timeframe encompasses three major waves of migration during which approximately six million German speakers migrated to the United States (Moltmann 9), making them the largest migrant group of the nineteenth century. While less than 5% of migrants were registered as German in 1890, this figure had risen to 25% by 1900 (Krawatzek and Sasse 217). German immigrant newspapers offer a complex view on the role of identity because they reflected the co-existence and interchange with varying “German” cultures on multiple levels (Bergquist, “German Communities” 13). The topic of “German identity” requires some explanatory remarks regarding the connotation of “German.” Two centuries ago, the concept of German identity was a vacant abstraction for Germans and German migrants (Krawatzek and Sasse 216–217). When Germany unified in 1871, it remained a profoundly fragmented nation: politically, culturally, economically, and linguistically. That is, when talking of German speakers, I also refer to migrants speaking in diverse varieties including, to name just a few, Swiss, Austrian, and Alsatian. The majority did not belong to representatives of the intellectual class, and the mother tongue that these people brought from Germany was not High German, but a dialect: Swabian, Bavarian, Luxembourgish, or Low German. “In America, as in Europe, it is language and tradition, rather than political allegiance that unites the foreign populations” as exemplified by readers of the migrant press (Park 5).

The time frame coincides with important political movements such as abolitionism, women’s suffrage, temperance, nativism, and nationalism that became highly debated topics in the news. It aligns with a period when the press achieved transregional circulation in new dimensions, facilitated by the expansion of steamship lines, railroad networks (see Bösch), and telegraph cables (see Wenzelhuemer).^[29] Technological advancements such as the adoption of the faster rotary press and the implementation of the Postal Act of 1879, which reduced mailing prices, had a significant impact (Birkle 51). “Rural Free Delivery [after 1897] opened up the world of printed matter to the rural public and paved the way for a national mail-order boom” (Blaschke, “German Immigrant Women” 318). Additionally, the era witnessed the mass production of industrialized goods, leading businesses to advertise their products in newspapers. Advertising became a crucial source of funding for newspapers, as sales alone could not cover production costs (Schmidt 10). Furthermore, insufficient copyright legislations and enforcements, along with the increasing literacy rates (Wittke 6), and the growing public interest in secular, sensational, and political content, played significant roles in transregional circulation of texts in Western countries, as Marc Priewe summarizes (403–404). This book ends in 1914 not only for practical reasons. While German-language newspapers experienced a period of prosperity during the long nineteenth century, their fortunes took a sharp downturn around the turn of the twentieth century. This was a result of various factors including the decline of newly arriving migrants, the second generation’s preference for English, and political developments at the beginning of the twentieth century to name just a few (Keck, “Großer Eröffnungs-Lunsch” 158). “[A] storm of anti-Germanism between the fall of 1917 and spring 1918” (Conzen, “Germans” 422), coupled with a decrease in advertisers and subscribers, particularly among the second generation, also contributed to their decline (Bergquist, “German-American Press” 149).^[30] Additionally, the banning of the German language and restrictions on its use in public spaces and schools further exacerbated the situation (Raab and Werner 15–16). The timeframe thus encompasses the period during which the German-language press in the U.S. expanded exponentially, giving rise to novel forms of textual production and cultivating new readerships.

Things evolve rapidly in our digital world. By the time of this book’s publication, Chronicling America has not only expanded its collection of German-language newspapers and added publications from other states but also released a new user interface. While the links referenced in this book should still be accessible to readers, the interface examined here has already become a historical object in its own right. This underscores the ongoing nature of digitization and highlights the role of critical engagement in shaping and advancing digital search functionality and user experience. The new interface of Chronicling America (as of August 2025) now features tutorials and search tips designed to help users navigate this vast archive and better understand the origins and creation of its sources. The Library of Congress and the National Digital Newspaper Program have responded to critiques from computational periodical scholars who have advocated for greater transparency and contextualization. These changes also reflect ongoing efforts to expand the collections to better represent the diversity of American press history including more newspapers published by Black Americans, Native Americans, various migrant communities, and especially by women.