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A biography of Chicago, Illinois, German American civic leader and city planner Charles H. Wacker is presented. He was born in Chicago in 1856 to German American parents and attended Chicago public schools and Lake Forest Academy. He attended college at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Geneva. He returned to Chicago and worked in real estate and as the leader of the organization the Chicago Plan Commission. He actively worked in organizations that promoted cooperation between Anglo-Americans and German Americans in Chicago. He died in 1929.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the German Americans, one of the largest immigrant groups at the time, were actively involved in the process of re-negotiating their linguistic and ethnic identities in the American environment. Consequently, particularly after 1850, they started setting up German-language schools in order to maintain their language and cultural heritage. Between 1870 and 1910, the Catholic schools for Germans in the United States used textbooks/readers in German to help their students to acculturate successfully to the American mainstream, while also maintaining their ethnic, linguistic and religious ties. This essay explores the ways in which the secular and religious information in a set of four fourth-level Catholic readers/textbooks reflects issues related both to the German Catholic education and to the Americanization trend at the turn into the twentieth century, from a synchronic perspective, as same-level readers, and from a diachronic one, by looking at their progression in time - 1870, 1874, 1897, and 1910. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three overtly American works by German American immigrant composer Lukas Foss (The Prairie, American Cantata, and American Landscapes) offer insight into the musical expression of Foss’s immigrant experience, a motive for his compositional eclecticism that has not been previously considered. This immigrant experience can be understood as both a negotiation of multiple identities and an ambiguous relationship with the United States, and is expressed in music through text, preexistent melody, musical style, instrumentation, and other factors. The later works show Foss’s increasing acculturation through a greater facility with American vernacular music and an increasing willingness to directly criticize his adopted country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses program notes from the Metropolitan opera to quantify changes in ethnic preferences as a result of news of German atrocities during World War I; these data indicate that the War created a persistent shift in ethnic preferences, which effectively switched the status of German Americans from a mainstream ethnicity to an ethnic minority until the late 1920s. Difference-in-difference analyses investigate whether this shift in preferences triggered taste-based discrimination in one of the world's most elite professional settings: applications to trade at the NYSE. This analysis indicates that changes in preferences more than doubled the probability that applicants with German-sounding names would be rejected. Placebo regressions for other non-German minorities yield no evidence of taste effects. Equivalent regressions that distinguish German Jewish from other Jewish applicants, however, indicate that German Jewish applicants were similarly affected as were other Germans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]