German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era

'A brilliant study in every respect, full of local texture, of importance for the whole story of a key period in US history, and of powerfully rendered transnational crosscurrents. Efford's deep research establishes the dramatic connection of German Americans to freedom struggles in the 1850s and 1860s and to the retreat from such commitments in the waning of Reconstruction, convincingly connecting both with the changing history of the land that immigrants left.' David Roediger, University of Illinois, and co-author of The Production of Difference (2012) 'German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era stands out in a growing literature on ethnicity, immigration, and the American Civil War by its attention, not only to the contributions of a discrete ethnic group to the great struggle over slavery, but also to the contentious process by which an immigrant group fractured along political and cultural lines constituted and reconstituted itself and the larger American polity.' Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University