title: German Americans

text: Immigrants from Germany in the mid-to-late-19th century brought many different religions with them. The most numerous were Lutheran or Catholic, although the Lutherans were themselves split among different groups. The more conservative Lutherans comprised the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Other Lutherans formed various synods, most of which merged with Scandinavian-based synods in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Catholic Germans started immigrating in large numbers in the mid to latter 19th century, spurred in particular by the "Kulturkampf".


title: German Americans

text: Some 19th-century immigrants, especially the "Forty-Eighters", were secular, rejecting formal religion. About 250,000 German Jews had arrived by the 1870s, and they sponsored reform synagogues in many small cities across the country. About two million Central and Eastern European Jews arrived from the 1880s to 1924, bringing more traditional religious practices.


title: German Americans

text: After two or three generations, most German Americans adopted mainstream American customs — some of which they heavily influenced — and switched their language to English. As one scholar concludes, "The overwhelming evidence... indicates that the German-American school was a bilingual one much (perhaps a whole generation or more) earlier than 1917, and that the majority of the pupils may have been English-dominant bilinguals from the early 1880s on." By 1914, the older members attended German-language church services, while younger ones attended English services (in Lutheran, Evangelical and Catholic churches). In German parochial schools, the children spoke English among themselves, though some of their classes were in German. In 1917–18, after the American entry into World WarI on the side of the Allies, nearly all German language instruction ended, as did most German-language church services.


title: German Americans

text: About 1.5 million Americans speak German at home, according to the 2000 census. From 1860 to 1917, German was widely spoken in German neighborhoods; see German in the United States. There is a false claim, called the Muhlenberg legend, that German was almost the official language of the U.S. There was never any such proposal. The U.S. has no official language, but use of German was strongly discouraged during World WarI and fell out of daily use in many places.


title: German Americans

text: There were fierce battles in Wisconsin and Illinois around 1890 regarding proposals to stop the use of German as the primary language in public and parochial schools. The Bennett Law was a highly controversial state law passed in Wisconsin in 1889 that required the use of English to teach major subjects in all public and private elementary and high schools. It affected the state's many German-language private schools (and some Norwegian schools), and was bitterly resented by German American communities. The German Catholics and Lutherans each operated large networks of parochial schools in the state. Because the language used in the classroom was German, the law meant the teachers would have to be replaced with bilingual teachers, and in most cases shut down. The Germans formed a coalition between Catholics and Lutherans, under the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the language issue produced a landslide for the Democrats, as Republicans dropped the issue until World WarI. By 1917, almost all schools taught in English, but courses in German were common in areas with large German populations. These courses were permanently dropped.


title: German Americans

text: German Americans are no longer a conspicuous ethnic group. As Melvin G. Holli puts it, "Public expression of German ethnicity is nowhere proportionate to the number of German Americans in the nation's population. Almost nowhere are German Americans as a group as visible as many smaller groups. Two examples suffice to illustrate this point: when one surveys the popular television scene of the past decade, one hears Yiddish humor done by comedians; one sees Polish, Greek, and East European detective heroes; Italian-Americans in situation comedies; and blacks such as the Jeffersons and Huxtables. But one searches in vain for quintessentially German-American characters or melodramas patterned after German-American experiences... A second example of the virtual invisibility is that, though German Americans have been one of the largest ethnic groups in the Chicago area (numbering near one-half million between 1900 and 1910), no museum or archive exists to memorialize that fact. On the other hand, many smaller groups such as Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, Jews, and others have museums, archives, and exhibit halls dedicated to their immigrant forefathers".


title: German Americans

text: But this inconspicuousness was not always the case. By 1910, German Americans had created their own distinctive, vibrant, prosperous German-language communities, referred to collectively as "Germania". According to historian Walter Kamphoefner, a "number of big cities introduced German into their public school programs". Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities "had what we now call two-way immersion programs: school taught half in German, half in English". This was a tradition which continued "all the way down to World WarI". According to Kamphoefner, German "was in a similar position as the Spanish language is in the 20th and 21st century"; it "was by far the most widespread foreign language, and whoever was the largest group was at a definite advantage in getting its language into the public sphere". Kamphoefner has come across evidence that as late as 1917, a German version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was still being sung in public schools in Indianapolis.


title: German Americans

text: Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon, writing about Fort Wayne, Indiana, states that before World WarI "German was the primary language in the homes, churches and parochial schools" of German American settlers. She states that "Many street signs were in German. (Main Street, for instance, was Haupt Strasse.) A large portion of local industry and commercial enterprises had at its roots German tooling and emigres. (An entire German town was moved to Fort Wayne when Wayne Knitting Mills opened.) Mayors, judges, firefighters and other community leaders had strong German ties. Social and sporting clubs and Germania Park in St. Joseph Township provided outlets to engage in traditional German activities". She goes on to state that "The cultural influences were so strong, in fact, that the Chicago Tribune in 1893 declared Fort Wayne a 'most German town'." Melvin G. Holli states that "No continental foreign-born group had been so widely and favorably received in the United States, or had won such high marks from its hosts as had the Germans before World WarI. Some public opinion surveys conducted before the war showed German Americans were even more highly regarded than immigrants from the mother culture, England". Holli states that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra once "had so many German-American musicians that the conductor often addressed them in the German language", and he states that "No ethnic theater in Chicago glittered with such a classy repertory as did the German-American theater, or served to introduce so many European classical works to American audiences".


title: German Americans

text: The transition to the English language was abrupt, forced by federal, state and local governments, and by public opinion, when the U.S. was at war with Germany in 1917–18. After 1917, the German language was seldom heard in public; most newspapers and magazines closed; churches and parochial schools switched to English. Melvin G. Holli states, "In 1917, the Missouri Synod's Lutheran Church conference minutes appeared in English for the first time, and the synod's new constitution dropped its insistence on using the language of Luther only and instead suggested bilingualism. Dozens of Lutheran schools also dropped instruction in the German language. English-language services also intruded themselves into parishes where German had been the "lingua franca". Whereas only 471 congregations nationwide held English services in 1910, the number preaching in English in the synod skyrocketed to 2,492 by 1919. The German Evangelical Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other states also anglicized its name by dropping German from the title". Writing about Fort Wayne, Indiana, Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon states that, in the First World War, "Local churches were forced to discontinue sermons in German, schools were pressured to stop teaching in German, and the local library director was ordered to purchase no more books written in German. The library shelves also were purged of English-language materials deemed sympathetic to or neutral on Germany. Anti-German sentiment forced the renaming of several local institutions. Teutonia Building, Loan & Savings became Home Loan & Savings, and The German-American bank became Lincoln National Bank & Trust Co." She continues that "in perhaps the most obvious bend to prevailing trends, Berghoff Brewery changed its motto from "A very German brew" to "A very good brew," according to "Fort Wayne: A Most German Town," a documentary produced by local public television station WFWA, Channel 39". Film critic Roger Ebert wrote how "I could hear the pain in my German-American father's voice as he recalled being yanked out of Lutheran school during World WarI and forbidden by his immigrant parents ever to speak German again".


title: German Americans

text: Melvin G. Holli states, regarding Chicago, that "After the Great War it became clear that no ethnic group was so de-ethnicized in its public expression by a single historic event as German Americans. While Polish Americans, Lithuanian Americans, and other subject nationalities underwent a great consciousness raising, German ethnicity fell into a protracted and permanent slump. The war damaged public expression of German ethnic, linguistic, and cultural institutions almost beyond repair". He states that, after the war, German ethnicity "would never regain its prewar public acclaim, its larger-than-life public presence, with its symbols, rituals, and, above all, its large numbers of people who took pride in their Teutonic ancestry and enjoyed the role of Uncle Sam's favored adopted son". He states "A key indicator of the decline of "Deutschtum" in Chicago was the census: the number identifying themselves to the census-taker as German-born plummeted from 191,000 in 1910 to 112,000 in 1920. This drop far exceeds the natural mortality rate or the number who might be expected to move. Self-identifiers had found it prudent to claim some nationality other than German. To claim German nationality had become too painful an experience". Along similar lines, Terrence G. Wiley states that, in Nebraska, "around 14 percent of the population had identified itself as being of German-origin in 1910; however, only 4.4 percent made comparable assertions in 1920. In Wisconsin, the decline in percentage of those identifying themselves as Germans was even more obvious. The 1920 census reported only 6.6. percent of the population as being of German-origin, as opposed to nearly 29 percent ten years earlier... These statistics led Burnell... to conclude that: "No other North American ethnic group, past or present, has attempted so forcefully to officially conceal their... ethnic origins. One must attribute this reaction to the wave of repression that swept the Continent and enveloped anyone with a German past"".


title: German Americans

text: The Catholic high schools were deliberately structured to commingle ethnic groups so as to promote ethnic (but not interreligious) intermarriage. German-speaking taverns, beer gardens and saloons were all shut down by Prohibition; those that reopened in 1933 spoke English.


title: German Americans

text: While its impact appears to be less well-known and studied than the impact which World WarI had on German Americans, World WarII was likewise difficult for them and likewise had the impact of forcing them to drop distinctive German characteristics and assimilate into the general US culture. According to Melvin G. Holli, "By 1930, some German American leaders in Chicago felt, as Dr. Leslie Tischauser put it, 'the damage done by the wartime experience had been largely repaired'. The German language was being taught in the schools again; the German theater still survived; and German Day celebrations were drawing larger and larger crowds. Although the assimilation process had taken its toll of pre-1914 German immigrants, a smaller group of newer postwar arrivals had developed a vocal if not impolitic interest in the rebuilding process in Germany under National Socialism. As the 1930s moved on, Hitler's brutality and Nazi excesses made Germanism once again suspect. The rise of Nazism, as Luebke notes, 'transformed German ethnicity in America into a source of social and psychological discomfort, if not distress. The overt expression of German-American opinion consequently declined, and in more recent years, virtually disappeared as a reliable index of political attitudes...'"


title: German Americans

text: Holli goes on to state that "The pain increased during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Congressman Martin Dies held public hearings about the menace of Nazi subversives and spies among the German Americans. In 1940, the Democratic party's attack on anti-war elements as disloyal and pro-Nazi, and the advent of the war itself, made German ethnicity too heavy a burden to bear. As Professor Tischauser wrote, "The notoriety gained by those who supported the German government between 1933 and 1941 cast a pall over German-Americans everywhere. Leaders of the German-American community would have great difficulty rebuilding an ethnic consciousness... Few German-Americans could defend what Hitler... had done to millions of people in pursuit of the 'final solution', and the wisest course for German-Americans was to forget any attachment to the German half of their heritage.""


title: German Americans

text: A notable example which highlights the generational effect of this de-germanization on German-American cultural identity is US President Donald Trump’s erroneous assertion of Swedish heritage as late as 1987 in The Art of the Deal. This error stems from Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who was of German heritage but attempted to pass himself off as Swedish amid the anti-German sentiment sparked by World WarII, a claim which would continue to mislead his family for decades.


title: German Americans

text: By the 1940s, Germania had largely vanished outside some rural areas and the Germans were thoroughly assimilated. According to Melvin G. Holli, by the end of World WarII, German Americans "were ethnics without any visible national or local leaders. Not even politicians would think of addressing them explicitly as an ethnic constituency as they would say, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, or African Americans." Holli states that "Being on the wrong side in two wars had a devastating and long-term negative impact on the public celebration of German-American ethnicity".


title: German Americans

text: Historians have tried to explain what became of the German Americans and their descendants. Kazal (2004) looks at Germans in Philadelphia, focusing on four ethnic subcultures: middle-class "Vereinsdeutsche", working-class socialists, Lutherans, and Catholics. Each group followed a somewhat distinctive path toward assimilation. Lutherans, and the better situated "Vereinsdeutsche" with whom they often overlapped, after World WarI abandoned the last major German characteristics and redefined themselves as old stock or as "Nordic" Americans, stressing their colonial roots in Pennsylvania and distancing themselves from more recent immigrants. On the other hand, working-class and Catholic Germans, groups that heavily overlapped, lived and worked with Irish and other European ethnics; they also gave up German characteristics but came to identify themselves as White ethnics, distancing themselves above all from African American recent arrivals in nearby neighborhoods. Well before World WarI, women in particular were becoming more and more involved in a mass consumer culture that lured them out of their German-language neighborhood shops and into English-language downtown department stores. The 1920s and 1930s brought English-language popular culture via movies and radio that drowned out the few surviving German language venues.


title: German Americans

text: Kazal points out that German Americans have not had an experience that is especially typical of immigrant groups. "Certainly, in a number of ways, the German-American experience was idiosyncratic. No other large immigrant group was subjected to such strong, sustained pressure to abandon its ethnic identity for an American one. None was so divided internally, a characteristic that made German Americans especially vulnerable to such pressure. Among the larger groups that immigrated in the country after 1830, none - despite regional variations - appears to have muted its ethnic identity to so great an extent." This quote from Kazal identifies both external pressures on German Americans and internal dividedness among them as reasons for their high level of assimilation.


title: German Americans

text: Regarding the external pressures, Kazal writes: "The pressure imposed on German Americans to forsake their ethnic identity was extreme in both nature and duration. No other ethnic group saw its 'adoptive fatherland' twice enter a world war against its country of origin. To this stigma, the Third Reich added the lasting one of the Holocaust. In her study of ethnic identity in the 1980s, sociologist Mary Waters noted that the 'effect of the Nazi movement and World WarII was still quite strong' in shaping 'popular perceptions of the German-American character', enough so that some individuals of mixed background often would acknowledge only the non-German part of their ancestry." Kazal contrasts this experience with the experiences of the Japanese, Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, east European Jews, and Irish. "Japanese Americans, of course, suffered far more during the Second World War", but until at least the 1950s, the pressure on Japanese Americans "ran toward exclusion from, rather than inclusion in, the nation". "The state and many ordinary European Americans refused to recognize Asians as potentially American. In contrast, they pressured Germans to accept precisely that American identity in place of a German one".


title: German Americans

text: Kazal goes on to state "The burden of "enemy" status made those pressures far greater for Germans than for other European ethnic groups. To some extent, American intervention in World WarI actually helped fuel ethnic nationalism in the United States among Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, and east European Jews, who felt their desires for existing or prospective homelands stood to gain from an Allied victory. Indeed, some historians have depicted the following decade as one when immigrants transcended local or regional homeland affiliations to craft or further consolidate national identities as Poles, Czechs, and Italians. Such groups escaped the fury of "100 percent Americanism" during the war, in part because of their obvious stake in the defeat of the Central Powers". As for Irish Americans, Kazal states that the lack of enthusiasm of many of them for helping England made them "vulnerable to the wartime "antihyphen" climate", but that "Irish nationalist activity intensified during and immediately after that war, as many Irish Americans became swept up in the events leading to the creation of the Irish Free State", and that "It made a difference for the long-term viability of Irish-American identity that the Irish homeland not only did not go to war with the United States but, in fact, emerged during the interwar years as a sovereign nation".


title: German Americans

text: Kazal then goes on to discuss the internal dividedness. He writes: "German-American identity fell victim not only to a peculiar set of events, but also to an extraordinarily high level of internal diversity. All ethnic groups have internal divides, whether of class, religion, gender, politics, or homeland region. What distinguished German America was that it incorporated not just some but "all" of these divisions. Irish Americans, for example, had lost their status as primarily a proletarian group by 1900, yet they were united by religion and politics. "Irish American" had come to mean Irish Catholic; the vast majority of Irish Americans subscribed to some form of Irish nationalism conflated with American patriotism; and Irish-American voters were overwhelmingly Democrats.


title: German Americans

text: The power of this synthesis, Kerby Miller argued, explains the survival of Irish-American identity despite the ebbing of organised Irish-American nationalism after the Free State's founding. For German Americans, religion and party politics were sources of division rather than of unity". Kazal goes on to state that "The subcultures of German America, meanwhile, had ample opportunity for contact, however testy, with non-German counterparts. The latter beckoned as destinations when the cost of being German-American rose too high". It is not just Kazal who has pointed out the internal dividedness of the German American community. Kathleen Neils Conzen has pointed it out; David Peterson states that Conzen, "along with many others, concludes that German-Americans' heterogeneity, particularly in religion, hampered their ability to build socially and politically stable ethnic communities", and that Conzen "stresses that German Americans assimilated relatively rapidly and that their diversity played a key role in that assimilation". (Conzen is also drawn upon by Joy Kristina Adams, who cites Conzen when she (Adams) states that "The diversity and size of the German settlements made them susceptible to long-term Americanization by fostering factionalism, increasing contacts between Germans and non-Germans, and weakening unified leadership".) The "Encyclopedia of the Great Plains" also stresses the internal dividedness, stating "One of the distinguishing characteristics of the German population in North America (especially in comparison to other immigrant groups) has been its relative degree of cultural diversity, reflected especially in the number of Christian denominations to which Germans belonged. In part this reflects patterns that had developed over centuries in Germany, whose population came to include nearly every variety of Christianity–from Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed groups to more radical Anabaptist pietistic movements such as Amish, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, and the Moravian church. It is not surprising, then, that nearly all of these denominations were represented among the German immigrant population in North America."


title: German Americans

text: Robert Paul McCaffery points out that "Despite their numbers... and unlike many immigrant groups, Germans never united as a powerful ethnic block. Religious disputes brought from the old country prevented them from uniting in the new. The two strongest denominations, Catholics and Lutherans, could not come together; and the Free Thinkers distrusted and shunned them both." "These divisions ran so deep that German-Americans could neither unite to fend off attacks engendered by World WarI, nor elect German candidates for political office". McCaffery states that "Discussions of the disunity of the Germans are many", giving a work by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a work by Kathleen Neils Conzen as examples, and he states that Leslie V. Tischauser "maintains that neither World WarI, political questions of importance to Germans, nor German candidates could unite the German-Americans of Chicago". Jason Todd Baker, meanwhile, writes that "Divided by imported regional prejudices, religious differences, political affiliations, and spread in pockets across the city, the Germans in nineteenth-century St. Louis comprised the city's largest immigrant ethnicity and possibly its least cohesive".


title: German Americans

text: He goes on to state that German Americans in St. Louis "could not be relied upon to do much of anything as a group. St. Louis served (and still does) as the seat of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a conservative American Lutheran confession, and their local strength led to friction with Germans of other faiths. These Lutherans did not traffic much with the sizable German Catholic population of the city, who often shared their houses of worship and political stances with the Irish. The small rabbinical German Jewish community remained insular. The Freethinkers, atheists, socialists, et al., had little use for any of these groups. In addition, the Germans, while heavily concentrated in a few pockets of north and south St. Louis, were spread across the city proper and into the larger countryside". And according to the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, "The diversity of religious expression among German-speaking immigrants was paralleled by a high degree of heterogeneity stemming from differences in regional and linguistic origins. This situation differed from that of other nineteenth-century immigrant groups, notably the Irish, but also Italians and people of other European backgrounds. The resulting lack of a unified and clearly definable German-American community explains in part why only few Americans, including those of German descent, have any idea when Steuben Day or German-American Day falls, whereas the Irish St. Patrick's Day is one of America's most popular celebrations, and Columbus Day, named after the Italian explorer, is a federal holiday".


title: German Americans

text: Despite the remarkable level of language assimilation reached by German Americans, distinct German usage survived well into the mid-to-late-20th century in some places. Writing about the town of Hustisford, Wisconsin, Jennifer Ludden discusses Mel Grulke, who was born in 1941, with German his first language at home; "Grulke's great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1880s, yet three generations later, his farmer parents still spoke German at home, attended German language church services and chatted in German with shopkeepers when they brought their farm eggs into town to sell".


title: German Americans

text: To this day, German speakers can be found in the United States among long-established Anabaptist groups – the Old Order Amish and most Old Order Mennonites speak Pennsylvania Dutch (or Bernese German or Alsatian by a minority of Amish) along with High German to various degrees (though they are generally fluent in English). All Hutterites speak Hutterite German and many "Russian" Mennonites speak Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect coming originally from the area around Danzig. The three Amish dialects as well as Hutterite German are still learned by all children of the group, whereas Plautdietsch-speakers tend much more to switch to English. Another group of German-speakers can be found in the Amana Colonies in Iowa; according to the website Statistical Atlas, all the residents of East Amana speak German at home, and only 67.7% can speak English "very well".


title: German Americans

text: It has been shown that cultural differences between the attitudes towards farming of German Americans, on the one hand, and of British-ancestry "Yankees", on the other, lasted into the 1980s and have to some extent lasted into the 21st century; German Americans have tended to see farming in a more family-oriented manner than Yankees.


title: German Americans

text: The influence of German cuisine is seen in the cuisine of the United States throughout the country, especially regarding pastries, meats and sausages, and above all, beer. Frankfurters (or "wieners", originating from Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, respectively), hamburgers, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and strudel are common dishes. German bakers introduced the pretzel, which is popular across the United States. Germans introduced America to lager, the most-produced beer style in the United States, and have been the dominant ethnic group in the beer industry since 1850.


title: German Americans

text: The oldest extant brewery in the United States is D. G. Yuengling & Son of Pottsville, Pennsylvania (approximately 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia), founded in 1829 by an immigrant from Aldingen in what is today Baden-Württemberg; the brewery's flagship product remains a 19th-century German-style amber lager. By the late 19th century, Milwaukee, with a large population of German origin, was once the home to four of the world's largest breweries owned by ethnic Germans (Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, and Miller) and was the number one beer producing city in the world for many years. Almost half of all current beer sales in the United States can be attributed to German immigrants, Capt. A. Pabst, Eberhard Anheuser, and Adolphus Busch, who founded Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis in 1860. Later German immigrants figured prominently in the rebirth of craft brews following Prohibition, culminating in the microbrew movement that swept the U.S. beginning in the late 1980s.


title: German Americans

text: German and German-American celebrations, such as Oktoberfest, Rhenish Carnival, German-American Day and Von Steuben Day are held regularly throughout the country. One of the largest is the German-American Steuben Parade in New York City, held every third Saturday in September. There are also major annual events in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, a traditional a center of the city's German population, in Cincinnati, where its annual "Oktoberfest Zinzinnati" is the largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany and in Milwaukee, which celebrates its German heritage with an annual German Fest. Many of the immigrants from Germany and other German-speaking countries came to Pennsylvania to what was then "Allegheny City" (now part of the North Side of the City of Pittsburgh). So many German speakers arrived, the area became known as "Deutschtown" and has been revived as such. Within Deutschtown and since 1854, The Teutonia Männerchor has been promoting and furthering German cultural traditions.


title: German Americans

text: Skat, the most popular card game in Germany, is also played in areas of the United States with large German American populations, such as Wisconsin and Texas.


title: German Americans

text: The following German international schools are in operation in the United States, serving German citizens, Americans, and other U.S. residents:


title: German Americans

text: German Americans have been influential in almost every field in American society, including science, architecture, business, sports, entertainment, theology, politics, and the military.


title: German Americans

text: German American general/flag military officers Baron von Steuben, George Armstrong Custer, John Pershing, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chester W. Nimitz, Carl Andrew Spaatz and Norman Schwarzkopf commanded the United States Army in the American Revolutionary War, American Civil War, Indian Wars, World WarI, World WarII, and the Persian Gulf War, respectively.


title: German Americans

text: German Americans were famous American politicians, including Carl Schurz, Friedrich Hecker, Frederick Muhlenberg, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and John Boehner. Henry Kissinger was a famous diplomat,


title: German Americans

text: Many German Americans have played a prominent role in American industry and business, including Henry J. Heinz (H. J. Heinz Company), Frank Seiberling (Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company), Walt Disney (Disney), John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), William Boeing (The Boeing Company and United Airlines), Walter Chrysler (Chrysler Corporation), Frederick and August Duesenberg (Duesenberg Automobile Corporation), Studebaker brothers (Studebaker Automobile Corporation), George Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Corporation), Levi Strauss (Levi Strauss & Co.), Charles Guth (PepsiCo Inc.), Bill Gates (Microsoft Corporation), Jawed Karim (YouTube), Elon Musk (SolarCity, SpaceX and Tesla Motors), James L. Kraft (Kraft Foods Inc.), Henry E. Steinway (Steinway & Sons), Charles Pfizer (Pfizer, Inc.), John Jacob Astor (Waldorf Astoria Hotels and Resorts), Conrad Hilton (Hilton Hotels & Resorts), Guggenheim family (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation), (Guggenheim Partners), Marcus Goldman and Samuel Sachs (The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.), Lehman Brothers (Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.), Charles Diebold (Diebold Nixdorf), Bernard Kroger (Kroger), Carl Laemmle (Universal Studios), Marcus Loew (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.), Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.), Herman Hollerith (International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)), Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.), Michael Dell (Dell Inc.), Eric Schmidt (Google Inc. and Alphabet Inc.), Peter Thiel (PayPal Inc.), Adolph Simon Ochs and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger ("The New York Times"), Charles Bergstresser ("The Wall Street Journal"), Al Neuharth ("USA Today"), Eugene Meyer ("The Washington Post") etc.


title: German Americans

text: German Americans were pioneers and dominated beer brewing for much of American history, beginning with breweries founded in the 19th century by German immigrants August Schell (August Schell Brewing Company), Christian Moerlein (Christian Moerlein Brewing Co.), Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch (Anheuser-Busch, currently part of AB InBev), Adolph Coors (Molson Coors Brewing Company), Frederick Miller (Miller Brewing Company), Frederick Pabst (Pabst Brewing Company), Bernhard Stroh (Stroh Brewery Company) and Joseph Schlitz (Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company).


title: German Americans

text: Some, such as Brooklyn Bridge engineer John A. Roebling and architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, left behind visible landmarks.


title: German Americans

text: Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, John Peter Zenger, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Weizenbaum set intellectual landmarks.


title: German Americans

text: After World War II, Wernher von Braun, and most of the leading engineers from the former German V-2 rocket base at Peenemünde, were brought to the U.S. They contributed decisively to the development of U.S. military rockets, as well as rockets for the NASA space program and the initiation of the Apollo program to land on the Moon. Similarly, fellow German aviation technologist Siegfried Knemeyer, the former top aviation technologist within the Reich Air Ministry during World WarII, was brought to the United States through a similar path to von Braun, and served as a civilian employee of the USAF for over twenty years. Neil Armstrong was the first human to land on the moon.


title: German Americans

text: There were many celebrities. Bruce Willis, George Eyser, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicklaus,Michael Keaton, Dale Earnhardt, Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff (Doris Day), Grace Kelly, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Weissmuller, Ernst Lubitsch, Walter Damrosch, Henry John Deutschendorf (John Denver), John Kay, Heidi Klum, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando,Nicole Kidman, Kim Basinger, Kevin Costner, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, David Hasselhoff, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt,Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin George Knipfing (Kevin James) became prominent athletes, actors, film directors or artists.


title: German Americans

text: There have been three presidents whose fathers were of German descent: Dwight D. Eisenhower (original family name "Eisenhauer" and maternal side is also German/Swiss), Herbert Hoover (original family name "Huber"), and Donald Trump (whose paternal grandparents, Frederick Trump and Elizabeth Christ Trump immigrated from Kallstadt in 1902).


title: German Americans

text: Presidents with maternal German ancestry include Harry Truman, whose maternal grandfather Solomon Young was a descendant of Johann Georg Jung and Hans Michael Gutknecht, who emigrated from Germany together in 1752, Richard Milhous Nixon, whose maternal ancestors were Germans who anglicized "Melhausen" to Milhous, and Barack Obama, whose maternal family's ancestry includes German immigrants from the South German town of Besigheim and from Bischwiller in the Alsace region that is nowadays part of France; both families came to America around 1750. Lyndon B. Johnson, Grover Cleveland, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and Theodore Roosevelt Jr had at least one German ancestor, but they did not emphasize it.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Noli Me Tángere (Latin for "Touch me not") is an 1887 novel by Filipino writer and activist José Rizal published during the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. It explores perceived inequities in law and practice in terms of the treatment by the ruling government and the Spanish Catholic friars of the resident peoples a hundred years ago.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Originally written by Rizal in Spanish, the book has since been more commonly published and read in the Philippines in either Tagalog (the major indigenous language), or English. The Rizal Law requires "Noli" and its sequel, "El filibusterismo" to be read by all high school students throughout the country. "Noli" is studied in Grade 9 and in Grade 10. The two novels are widely considered to be the national epic of the Philippines. They have been adapted in many forms, such as operas, musicals, plays, and other forms of art.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The title originates from the Biblical passage John 20:13-17. In Rizal's time it also referred to cancers that occurred on the face, particularly cancers of the eyelid; touching such lesions irritated them, causing pain. As an ophthalmologist, Rizal was familiar with the cancer and the name. He is explicit about the connection in the novel's dedication, which begins: ('To my country') and continues with "...a cancer of so malignant a character that the least touch irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains." Rizal probes the cancers of Filipino society. Early English translations of the novel used different titles, such as An Eagle Flight (1900) and The Social Cancer (1912), but more recent English translations use the original title.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: José Rizal, a Filipino nationalist and polymath, conceived the idea of writing a novel that would expose the backwardness and lack of progress of Philippine society because of the burden of colonization. According to historian Carlos Quirino, the novel bears similarities in terms of characterization and plot to the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós' "Doña Perfecta". Rizal intended to express the way Filipino culture was perceived to be backward, anti-progress, anti-intellectual, and not conducive to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. At the time he was a student of medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Other Filipinos were also working or studying in Madrid, which as the capital of Spain was the center of culture and universities. At a gathering on January 2, 1884, of friends at the house of Pedro A. Paterno, Rizal proposed that a group of Filipinos should collaborate on a novel about the Philippines. His proposal was unanimously approved by those present, among whom were Pedro, Máximo Viola and Antonio Paterno, Graciano López Jaena, Evaristo Aguirre, Eduardo de Lete, Julio Llorente, and Valentin Ventura. However, they never got into the project. Although agreeing to help, none of the others wrote anything. Initially, Rizal planned for the novel to encompass all phases of Filipino life, but most of his friends, all young males, wanted to write about women. Rizal saw that his companions spent more time gambling and flirting with Spanish women than writing. Because of this, he decided to draft the novel alone.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Crisóstomo Ibarra, the "mestizo" son of the recently deceased Don Rafael Ibarra, is returning to San Diego town in Laguna after seven years of study in Europe. Kapitán Tiago, a family friend, invites him to a reunion party in Manila. At the party Crisóstomo meets Padre Dámaso, who was San Diego's parish priest when Crisóstomo left for Europe. Dámaso treats Crisóstomo with hostility, surprising the young man who regarded the priest as a friend of his father. Later as Crisóstomo was walking back to his hotel, Lieutenant Guevara, another friend of his father, informs him that Don Rafael may have been killed for political reasons and Dámaso may have been involved. Guevara warns him to be careful.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The following day, Crisóstomo returns to Tiago's home to meet with his childhood sweetheart, Tiago's daughter María Clara. As the two flirt and reminisce, María reads back to him his farewell letter where he quoted a discussion he had with his father regarding the state of the country. Deeply moved, Ibarra excuses himself saying that he had to prepare for his trip to San Diego.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Arriving at the town, Crisóstomo goes to the cemetery to visit his father's grave. He meets the gravedigger, who tells him that the parish priest had ordered Don Rafael's remains transferred to the Chinese cemetery, but that he threw the corpse into the lake instead out of fear and pity. At the same time, as Padre Bernardo Salví, the new parish priest, walks by, an enraged Crisóstomo pushes him to the ground, demanding an explanation. A fearful Salví states that he was only newly assigned to the town but reveals that Padre Dámaso ordered the transfer.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Crisóstomo decides to forgive and commits to improvements in his town. He plans to build a private school, believing that his paisanos would benefit from a more modern education than what is offered in the government schools, which were under the influence of the friars. Enjoying widespread support from the locals and Spanish authorities, Crisóstomo's project advances quickly. He receives counsel from Don Anastacio, a local philosopher, and recruits a progressive schoolmaster. Construction was set to begin shortly with the cornerstone to be laid during San Diego's town fiesta.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: One day, Crisóstomo, María and their friends go on a picnic along the shores of the Laguna de Baý. They discover that a crocodile had been lurking in the Ibarras' fish pens. Elías, the boatman, jumps into the water with a knife drawn. Sensing Elías is in danger, Crisóstomo jumps in and the two subdue the animal together. Elías proclaims himself indebted to Crisóstomo.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: On the day of the fiesta, Elías warns Crisóstomo of a plot to kill him at the cornerstone ceremony. Sure enough, Crisóstomo evades injury and the would-be assassin is killed. During the luncheon, an uninvited Padre Dámaso further berates Crisóstomo. The other guests hiss for discretion, but Dámaso carries on and insults the memory of Don Rafael. Crisóstomo then loses control, strikes the friar unconscious and holds a knife to his neck. Crisóstomo tells the guests about Dámaso's schemes that resulted in his father's death. However, he releases Dámaso when María Clara pleads for mercy. Crisóstomo is excommunicated from the Church but has it lifted in Manila through the intercession of the sympathetic captain-general. Returning to San Diego, he finds María ill and refusing to see him.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Meanwhile, Elías senses Crisóstomo's influence with the government and takes him for a sail so they can talk in private. Elías tells him about a revolutionary group trying to recruit him, but that he stalled in order to get Crisóstomo's views first. The conversation shifts to Elías' family history. It turns out that Elías' grandfather in his youth worked as a bookkeeper in a Manila office but was falsely accused by the Spanish owner of arson when the office burned down. He was prosecuted and jailed; upon release he was shunned by the community as a dangerous lawbreaker. His wife turned to prostitution to support the family. Their lives were destroyed.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Crisóstomo says that he cannot help and his school project is his focus. Rebuffed, Elías advises Crisóstomo to avoid him in the future, for his own safety. However, Elías returns a few days later to tell him of a rogue uprising planned for that same night. The instigators had used Crisóstomo's name in vain to recruit malcontents. The authorities know of the uprising and are prepared to spring a trap on the rebels. Realizing the scheme's repercussions, Crisóstomo abandons his school project and enlists Elías in sorting out and destroying documents that may implicate him. Elías obliges, but comes across a name familiar to him: Don Pedro Eibarramendia. Crisóstomo says Pedro was his great-grandfather, and that they had to shorten his long family name. Elías responds that Eibarramendia was the same Spaniard who accused his grandfather of arson, and thus condemned Elías and his family to misfortune. Frenzied, he raises his bolo to smite Crisóstomo, but regains his senses and leaves.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The uprising takes place, and many of the rebels are captured or killed. They point to Crisóstomo as instructed and he is arrested. The following morning, the instigators are found dead -- Padre Salví, the mastermind of the uprising, ordered his senior sexton to kill them in order to silence them. Elías, meanwhile, sneaks back into the Ibarra mansion and sorts through documents and valuables, then burns down the house. Crisóstomo and his co-accused are loaded into horse carts and taken to prison, with their townmates shouting in anger and casting stones as they passed.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Kapitán Tiago later on hosts a dinner at his riverside house in Manila to celebrate María Clara's engagement with Alfonso Linares, a Peninsular who was presented as her new suitor following Crisóstomo's excommunication. Present at the party were Padre Salví, Padre Sibyla, Lieutenant Guevarra, and other acquaintances. They spoke of the events in San Diego and Crisóstomo's fate. Salví, who lusted after María Clara all along and staged the uprising in order to frame Crisóstomo, says he requested to be moved to the Convent of the Poor Clares in Manila under the pretense of the San Diego uprising being too much for him.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Guevara outlines how the court came to condemn Crisóstomo. In a signed letter he wrote before leaving for Europe, Crisóstomo spoke of his father, an alleged rebel who died in prison. Somehow this letter fell into the hands of an enemy, and Crisóstomo's handwriting was copied to create recruitment letters for the uprising. The signature on the letters was similar to Crisóstomo's seven years before, but not at present day. Crisóstomo only had to deny ownership of the signature on the original letter and the case built on the bogus letters would be dismissed. But upon seeing the letter, which was of course his farewell letter to María Clara, Crisóstomo lost the will to fight the charges, and he is sentenced to be deported. Guevara then approaches María, who had been listening. Privately but sorrowfully, he congratulates her for her common sense in yielding the letter. Now, she can live a life of peace. María is devastated.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Later that evening Crisóstomo, having escaped prison with the help of Elías, confronts María in secret. María admits giving up his letter, but only because Salví found Dámaso's old letters in the San Diego parsonage, letters from María's mother who was then pregnant with her and begging Dámaso for an abortion. It turns out that Dámaso was María's biological father. Salví promised not to divulge Dámaso's letters in exchange for Crisóstomo's farewell letter. Crisóstomo forgives her, María swears her undying love, and they part with a kiss.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Crisóstomo and Elías slip unnoticed through the Estero de Binondo and into the Pasig River. Elías tells Crisóstomo that his family's treasures are buried in the Ibarra forest in San Diego. Wishing to make restitution, Crisóstomo tells Elías to escape with him to a foreign country, where they will live as brothers. Elías declines, stating that his fate lies with the country he wishes to reform. Crisóstomo then tells him of his own desire for revolution, to lengths that even Elías was unwilling to go. Just then, sentries catch up with their boat at the mouth of the Pasig River and pursue them across Laguna de Bay. Elías orders Crisóstomo to lie down and to meet him at the Ibarra mausoleum in the forest. He jumps into the water to distract the pursuers and is shot several times.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The following day, newspapers report that Crisóstomo, the fugitive, had been killed by sentries in pursuit. María remorsefully demands of Dámaso that her wedding with Linares be called off and that she be entered into the cloister, or the grave. Seeing her resolution, Dámaso admits he ruined the Ibarra family and her relationship with Crisóstomo because he was a mere "mestizo" and Dámaso wanted María to be happy and secure, and that was possible only if she married a peninsular Spaniard. Knowing why Salví had earlier requested to be assigned as chaplain in the Convent of the Poor Clares, Dámaso pleads with María to reconsider, but to no avail. Weeping, Dámaso consents, knowing the horrible fate that awaits his daughter within the convent but finding it more tolerable than her suicide.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: A few nights later in the Ibarra forest, a boy pursues his mother through the darkness. The woman went insane with the constant beating of her husband, the death of her younger son in the hands of Padre Salví, and the loss of her elder son to the Guardia Civil. Basilio, the boy, catches up with Sisa, his mother, inside the Ibarra mausoleum, but the strain had already been too great for Sisa. She dies in Basilio's embrace. Elías then stumbles into the mausoleum, himself dying from his wounds. He instructs Basilio to burn their bodies and if no one comes, to dig inside the mausoleum. He will find treasure, which he is to use for his own education.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: As Basilio leaves to fetch the wood, Elías sinks to the ground and whispers that he will die without seeing the dawn of freedom for his people and that those who see it must welcome it and not forget them that died in the darkness.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Afterwards, it is revealed that Dámaso is transferred to a remote town; distraught, he is found dead a day later. Tiago fell into depression and became addicted to opium and faded to obscurity. Salví, while waiting for his consecration as a bishop, serves as chaplain of the Convent of the Poor Clares. Meanwhile, during a stormy evening in September, two patrolmen reported seeing a specter on the roof of the convent weeping in despair. The next day, a government representative visited the convent to try to investigate the previous night's events. One of the nuns had a wet and torn gown and with tears told the representative of "tales of horror" and begged for "protection against the outrages of hypocrisy" (strongly suggesting that Padre Salví regularly rapes her when he is in the convent). The abbess, however, said that she was mad. A general also attempted to investigate the nun's case, but by then the abbess prohibited visits to the convent. Nothing more was said about this nun, or for that matter, María Clara.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Rizal finished the novel in February 1887. At first, according to one of Rizal's biographers, Rizal feared the novel might not be printed, and that it would remain unread. He was struggling with financial constraints at the time and thought it would be hard to pursue printing the novel.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: His friend Máximo Viola provided some financial aid, enabling Rizal to have the book printed at Berliner Buchdruckerei-Aktiengesellschaft in Berlin. Viola loaned Rizal ₱300 for 2,000 copies. The printing was finished earlier than the estimated five months. Viola arrived in Berlin in December 1886, and by March 21, 1887, Rizal had sent a copy of the novel to his friend, Blumentritt.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Spanish authorities in the Philippines banned the book, but copies were smuggled into the country. The first Philippine edition (and the second published edition) was printed in 1899 in Manila by Chofre y Compania in Escolta.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: On August 21, 2007, a 480-page English-language version of "Noli me tangere" was released to major Australian book stores. Penguin Classics (an imprint by Penguin Books) published this edition in keeping with its "commitment to publish the major literary classics of the world."


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: American writer Harold Augenbraum, who first read "Noli" in 1992, had translated the novel. A writer well-acquainted with translating other Spanish-language literary works, Augenbraum proposed to translate the novel. Penguin changed their initial plan of adapting existing English versions and instead commissioned him to make a new translation.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: This novel and its sequel, "El filibusterismo" (nicknamed "El fili"), were banned by Spanish authorities in the Philippines because of their allegations of corruption and abuse by the colonial government and the Catholic Church. Copies of the book were nevertheless smuggled in and hidden, and when Rizal returned to the Philippines after completing medical studies, he quickly ran afoul of the local government. A few days after his arrival, Rizal was summoned to Malacañan Palace by Governor-General Emilio Terrero, who told him of the charge that "Noli me tangere" contained subversive elements. After a discussion, Terrero was appeased but still unable to offer resistance to pressure from the Church against the book. The persecution can be discerned from Rizal's letter to Leitmeritz:


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Rizal was exiled to Dapitan in Mindanao, then later arrested for "inciting rebellion" based largely on his writings. Rizal was executed by firing squad at Bagumbayan outside Manila's walls on December 30, 1896, at the age of thirty-five, at the park that now bears his name.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Rizal depicted nationality by emphasizing the positive qualities of Filipinos: the devotion of a Filipina and her influence on a man's life, the deep sense of gratitude, and the solid common sense of the Filipinos under the Spanish regime.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The work was instrumental in creating a unified Filipino national identity and consciousness, as many natives previously identified with their respective regions. It lampooned, caricatured and exposed various elements in colonial society. Two characters in particular have become classics in Filipino culture: María Clara, who has become a personification of the ideal Filipino woman, loving and unwavering in her loyalty to her spouse; and the priest Father Dámaso, who reflects the covert fathering of illegitimate children by members of the Spanish clergy.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The book indirectly influenced the Philippine Revolution of independence from the Spanish Empire, even though Rizal actually advocated direct representation to the Spanish government and an overall larger role for the Philippines within Spain's political affairs. In 1956, Congress passed Republic Act 1425, more popularly known as the Rizal Law, which requires all levels in Philippine schools to teach the novel as part of their curriculum. "Noli me tangere" is being taught to third-year secondary school (now Grade 9, due to the new K-12 curriculum) students, while its sequel "El filibusterismo" is being taught for fourth-year secondary school (now Grade 10) students. The novels are incorporated to their study and survey of Philippine literature. Both of Rizal's novels were initially banned from Catholic educational institutions given its negative portrayal of the Church, but this taboo has been largely superseded as religious schools conformed to the Rizal Law.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra y Magsalin, commonly referred to in the novel as Ibarra or Crisóstomo, is the novel's protagonist. The "mestizo" (mixed-race) son of Filipino businessman Don Rafael Ibarra, he studied in Europe for seven years. Ibarra is also María Clara's fiancé.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: María Clara de los Santos y Alba, commonly referred to as María Clara, María, or Clarita, is Ibarra's fiancée and the most beautiful and widely celebrated girl in San Diego. She was raised by Kapitán Tiago de los Santos, and his cousin, Isabel. In the later parts of the novel, she was revealed to be an illegitimate daughter of Father Dámaso, the former curate of the town, and Doña Pía Alba, Kapitán Tiago's wife, who had died giving birth to María Clara.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: At the novel's end, a heartbroken yet resolved María Clara entered the Real Monasterio de Santa Clara (a Poor Clare nunnery) after learning the truth of her parentage and mistakenly believing that her lover, Crisóstomo, had been killed. In the epilogue, Rizal stated that it is unknown whether María Clara is still living within the walls of the convent or is already dead.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Don Santiago de los Santos, known by his nickname Tiago and political title Kapitán Tiago, is said to be the richest man in the region of Binondo and possessed real properties in Pampanga and Laguna de Baý. He is also said to be a good Catholic, a friend of the Spanish government and thus was considered a Spaniard by the colonial elite. Kapitán Tiago never attended school, so he became the domestic helper of a Dominican friar who gave him an informal education. He later married Pía Alba from Santa Cruz.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Dámaso Verdolagas, better known as Padre Dámaso, is a Franciscan friar and the former parish curate of San Diego. He is notorious for his brashness and cruelty during his ministry in the town. An enemy of Crisóstomo's father Don Rafael Ibarra, Dámaso is revealed to be María Clara's biological father. Later, he and María Clara had bitter arguments on whether she would marry Alfonso Linares de Espadaña (which he preferred) or enter the nunnery (her desperate alternative). At the end of the novel, he is again reassigned to a distant town and later found dead in his bed.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Elías is Ibarra's mysterious friend and ally. Elías made his first appearance as a pilot during a picnic of Ibarra and María Clara and her friends.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Chapter 50 explores Elías' family history. Elías's grandfather Ingkong, in his youth, worked as a bookkeeper in a Manila office. One night the office burned down, and Don Pedro Eibarramendia, the Spaniard owner, accused him of arson. Ingkong was imprisoned and upon release was shunned by the community as a dangerous lawbreaker. His wife Impong turned to prostitution to support themselves but eventually they were driven into the hinterlands. There Impong bore her first son, Balat.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Driven to depression, Ingkong hangs himself deep in the forest. Impong was sickly for lack of nourishment in the forest and was not strong enough to cut down his corpse and bury him, and Balat was then still very young. The stench led to their discovery, and Impong was accused of killing her husband. She and her son fled to another province where she bore another son.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Balat grew up to be a legendary bandit. When he was finally caught he was cut limb by limb and his head was deposited in front of Impong's house. Seeing the severed head of her son, Impong died of shock. Impong's younger son, knowing their deaths would somehow be imputed upon him, fled to the province of Tayabas where he met and fell in love with a rich young heiress. They have an affair and the lady got pregnant.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: But before they could marry, his records were dug up. Then the father, who disapproved of him from the start, had him imprisoned. The lady gave birth to Elías and his twin sister but died while the two were still children. Nonetheless, the twins were well cared for and doted over by their grandfather. Elías went to Ateneo and his sister to La Concordia, but as they wanted to become farmers they eventually returned to Tayabas.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: He and his sister grew up not knowing about their father except that he had died long ago. Elías was an abusive brat who took particular joy in berating an elderly servant who, nevertheless, always submitted to his whims. His sister was more refined and eventually was betrothed to a fine young man. But before they could marry, Elías ran afoul with a distant relative. The verbal scuffle mounted to the point where records were dug up, and Elías and his sister, as well as a good part of town, learned the truth. The elderly servant whom Elías frequently abused was their father.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: The scandal caused the engagement of Elías' sister to break off. Depressed, the girl disappeared one day and was eventually found dead along the seashore. Elías himself lost face and became a wanderer. Like his uncle Balat, he became a bandit, but by degrees he became the gentler, more reserved, and more noble character first introduced in the novel.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Also known as Don Anastasio, he was a former student of philosophy. His wealthy mother, not wanting him to forget God, presented him with the choice of entering the priesthood or leaving college. He leaves college, marries his sweetheart, but loses her and his mother in the same year. To ensure he does not fall into depression or vice, he devotes his time on his books and in so doing neglects the wealth his mother left for him. He writes using an invented form of alphabet that is based on the Tagalog language, hoping "that the future generations may be able to decipher it.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Doña Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadaña, commonly known as Doña Victorina, is an ambitious Filipina who classifies herself as a Spaniard and mimics Spanish ladies by putting on heavy make-up. The novel narrates Doña Victorina's younger days: she had many admirers, but she spurned them all because none of them were Spaniards. Later on, she met and married Don Tiburcio de Espadaña, an official of the customs bureau ten years her junior. However, their marriage is childless.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Her husband assumes the title of medical "doctor" even though he never attended medical school; using fake documents and certificates, Tiburcio illegally practices medicine. Tiburcio's usage of the title "Dr." consequently makes Victorina assume the title "Dra." ("doctora", female doctor). Apparently, she uses the whole name Doña Victorina de los Reyes "de" de Espadaña, with double "de" to emphasize her marriage surname. She seems to feel that this awkward titling makes her more "sophisticated".


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Due to their tragic but endearing story, these characters are often parodied in modern Filipino popular culture.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: There are several secondary and minor characters in "Noli Me Tángere". Names indicated in parentheses are the standard Filipinisation of Spanish names in the novel.


title: Noli Me Tángere (novel)

text: Many English and Tagalog translations have been made of "Noli Me Tángere", as well as a few other languages. The copyrights of the original text have expired, and the copyrights of some translators have also expired, so certain translations are in the public domain and have been put online by Project Gutenberg.


title: Melungeon

text: Melungeons ( ) are an ethnicity from the Southeastern United States who descend from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as indentured servants and later as slaves. Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.


title: Melungeon

text: "Tri-racial" describes populations who claim to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200,000.


title: Melungeon

text: The ancestry and identity of Melungeons has been a highly controversial subject. Secondary sources disagree as to their ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and geographic origins and identity. They might accurately be described as a loose collection of families of diverse ethnic origins that migrated to frontier areas; settled near one another; and intermarried, mostly in Hancock and Hawkins Counties in Tennessee; nearby areas of Kentucky; and Lee County, Virginia. Their ancestors can usually be traced back to colonial Virginia and the Carolinas. They were largely endogamous through the 19th century and married primarily within their community until about 1900.


title: Melungeon

text: Melungeons have been defined and documented as having multiracial ancestry. They did not exhibit characteristics that could be classified as those of a single racial phenotype. Most modern-day descendants of Appalachian families that are traditionally regarded as Melungeon are generally European American in appearance and often (though not always) have dark hair and eyes and a swarthy or olive complexion. Descriptions of Melungeons have varied widely over time. In the 19th and the early 20th centuries, they were sometimes identified as "Portuguese," Native American, or light-skinned African American. In the 19th century, free people of color sometimes identified as Portuguese or Native American to avoid being classified as black in the segregated slave societies.


title: Melungeon

text: Other Melungeon individuals and families are accepted and identify as white, particularly since the mid-20th century. They have tended to "marry white" since the 19th century.


title: Melungeon

text: Scholars and commentators do not agree on who should be included under the term "Melungeon." Contemporary authors identify differing lists of surnames to be included as families associated with Melungeons. The English surname Gibson and Irish surname Collins appear frequently, and the genealogist Pat Elder calls them "core" surnames. Vardy Collins and Shep Gibson had settled in Hancock County, and they and other Melungeons are documented by land deeds, slave sales, and marriage licenses.


title: Melungeon

text: The original meaning of the word "Melungeon" is obscure. From about the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, it referred exclusively to one tri-racial isolate group: the descendants of the multiracial Collins, Gibson, and several other related families at Newman's Ridge, Vardy Valley, and other settlements in and around Hancock and Hawkins Counties, Tennessee.


title: Melungeon

text: According to the principle of "partus sequitur ventrem", which Virginia incorporated into law in 1662, children born in the colonies were assigned the social status of their mother regardless of their father's ethnicity or citizenship. That meant the children of enslaved African or African-American women were born into slavery, but it also meant the children of free white or mulatto women, even if they were fathered by enslaved African men, were born free. The free descendants of such unions formed the majority of the ancestors of the free families of color listed in the 1790 and 1810 censuses. Early colonial Virginia was very much a "melting pot" of peoples, and before slavery hardened as a racial caste, white and black working-class people had often lived and worked in close quarters and formed relationships and marriages.


title: Melungeon

text: Some of the early multiracial families were ancestors of the later Melungeons, but each family line must be traced separately. Over the generations, most individuals of the group called Melungeon were persons of mixed European and African descent, sometimes also with Native American ancestry, whose ancestors had been free in colonial Virginia.


title: Melungeon

text: Edward Price's dissertation on "Mixed-Blood Populations of the Eastern United States as to Origins, Localizations, and Persistence" (1950) stated that children of European and free black unions had also intermarried with persons of alleged Native American ancestry. In 1894, the US Department of the Interior, in its "Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed," noted that the Melungeons in Hawkins County "claim to be Cherokee of mixed blood." The term "Melungeon" has since sometimes been applied as a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of individuals with mixed-race ancestry.


title: Melungeon

text: In 1995, Paul Heinegg published "Free African American Families in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware", and he has since published regular updates. He found through his research and documented that the great majority of free people of color in the 1790 and 1810 censuses had ancestors from colonial Virginia, who were the children of unions between free white women and free, indentured, or enslaved African or African-American men.


title: Melungeon

text: Similarly, in 2012, the genealogist Roberta Estes and her fellow researchers of the Melungeon DNA Project reported that the Melungeon lines had likely originated in the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s before slavery became widespread in the United States. They concluded that as laws to prevent the mixing of races were put into place, those family groups intermarried with one another. Creating an endogamous group, they migrated together, sometimes along with white neighbors, from western Virginia through the Piedmont frontier of North Carolina, before they settled primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee. In addition, the Melungeon DNA Project has documented multiracial ancestry, primarily European and African, for numerous people identified as Melungeon, which affirms the evidence from written documentation.


title: Melungeon

text: Free people of color are documented as migrating with European-American neighbors in the first half of the 18th century to the frontiers of Virginia and North Carolina, where they received land grants like their neighbors. For instance, the Collins, Gibson, and Ridley (Riddle) families owned land adjacent to one another in Orange County, North Carolina, where they and the Bunch family were listed in 1755 as "free Molatas (mulattoes)" subject to taxation on tithes. By settling in frontier areas, free people of color found more amenable living conditions and could escape some of the racial strictures of Virginia and North Carolina Tidewater plantation areas.


title: Melungeon

text: In 1719, South Carolina decided who should be an "Indian" for tax purposes since American [Indian] slaves were taxed at a lesser rate than African slaves. The act stated: "And for preventing all doubts and scruples that may arise what ought to be rated on mustees, mulattoes, etc. all such slaves as are not entirely Indian shall be accounted as negro.


title: Melungeon

text: Forbes said that at the time, "mustees" and "mulattoes" were terms for persons of partly Native American ancestry. He wrote,


title: Melungeon

text: My judgment (to be discussed later) is that a mustee was primarily part-African and American [Indian] and that a mulatto was usually part-European and American [Indian]. The act is also significant because it asserts that part-American [Indians] with "or without" [emphasis added] African ancestry could be counted as Negroes, thus having an implication for all later slave censuses.This view does not have a consensus.


title: Melungeon

text: In about 1767, some of the ancestors of the Melungeons began to reach the frontier New River area, where they are listed in the 1780s on tax lists of Montgomery County, Virginia. From there they migrated south in the Appalachian Range to Wilkes County, North Carolina, where some are listed as "white" on the 1790 census. They resided in a part that became Ashe County, where they are designated as "other free" in 1800.


title: Melungeon

text: The Collins and Gibson families (identified as Melungeon ancestors) were recorded in 1813 as members of the Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia. They appear to have been treated as social equals of the white members. The earliest documented use of the term "Melungeon" is found in the minutes of that church (see Etymology below). While there are historical references to the documents, the evidence has come from transcribed copies.


title: Melungeon

text: From the Virginia and North Carolina frontiers, the families migrated west into frontier Tennessee and Kentucky. The earliest known Melungeon in what is now northeast Tennessee was Millington Collins, who executed a deed in Hawkins County in 1802. However, there is some evidence that Vardy Collins and Shep Gibson had settled in Hawkins (what is now Hancock County) by 1790. Several Collins and Gibson households were listed in Floyd County, Kentucky in the 1820 census, where they were classified as "free persons of color." In the 1830 censuses of Hawkins and neighboring Grainger County, Tennessee, the Collins and Gibson families are listed as "free-colored." Melungeons were residents of the part of Hawkins that in 1844 was organized as Hancock County.


title: Melungeon

text: By 1830, the Melungeon community in Hawkins County numbered 330 people in 55 families. In adjoining Grainger County, there were 130 people in 24 families. According to Edward Price, "Because of them, Hawkins County had more free colored persons in the 1830 census than any other county in Tennessee except Davidson (which includes Nashville) and more free colored families named Collins than any other county in the United States." Melungeon families have also been traced in Ashe County, in northwestern North Carolina.


title: Melungeon

text: Contemporary accounts documented that Melungeon ancestors were considered by appearance to be mixed race. During the 18th and the early 19th centuries, census enumerators classified them as "mulatto," "other free," or as "free persons of color." Sometimes, they were listed as "white" or sometimes as "black" or "negro" but almost never as "Indian". One family described as "Indian" was the Ridley (Riddle) family, as was noted on a 1767 Pittsylvania County, Virginia, tax list. It had been designated as "mulattoes" in an earlier record of 1755. Estes et al., in their 2012 summary of the Melungeon Core DNA Testing Program, stated that the Riddle family is the only Melungeon participant with historical records identifying them as having Native American origins, but their DNA is European. Among the participants, only the Sizemore family is documented as having Native American DNA.


title: Melungeon

text: The court record of "Jacob Perkins vs. John White" (1858) in Johnson County, Tennessee, provides definitions of the time related to race and free people of color. As in Virginia, if a free person was mostly white (up to one-eighth black), he was considered legally white and a citizen of the state:


title: Melungeon

text: "Persons that are known and recognized by the Constitution and laws of Tennessee, as free persons of color are those who by the act of 1794 section 32 are taken and deemed to be capable in law to be certified in any case what is in, except against each other or in the language of the statute "all Negroes, Indians, Mulattoes, and all persons of mixed blood descended from Negro or Indian ancestors to the third generation inclusive though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person, white bond or free."... That if the great grandfather of Plaintiff was an Indian or Negro and he is descended on the mother's side from a white woman, without any further Negro or Indian blood than such as he derived on the father's side, then the Plaintiff is not of mix blood, or within the third generation inclusive; in other words that if the Plaintiff has not in his veins more than 1/8 of Negro or Indian blood, he is a citizen of this state and it would be slanderous to call him a Negro."


title: Melungeon

text: During the 19th century, their intermarriages with white spouses caused Melungeon-surnamed families to be increasingly classified as white on census records. In 1935, a Nevada newspaper anecdotally described Melungeons as "mulattoes" with "straight hair."


title: Melungeon

text: Ariela Gross has shown by analysis of court cases, the shift from perceptions of an individual as "mulatto" to "white" was often dependent upon appearance and, especially, community perception of a person's activities in life: who one associated with and whether the person fulfilled the common obligations of citizens. Census takers were generally people of a community and so they classified people racially as they were known by the community. Definitions of racial categories were often imprecise and ambiguous, especially for "mulatto" and "free person of color." In the Thirteen Colonies and the United States at times during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, "mulatto" could mean a mixture of African and European, African and Native American, European and Native American, or all three. At the same time, those groups intermarried.


title: Melungeon

text: Persons were often identified by the company they kept and which ethnic culture they identified with. There were differences between how people identified themselves and how others identified them. Because of slavery, colonial and state laws were biased toward identifying multiracial people of partial African origin as African or "black" although persons of mixed African and Native American descent often identified and lived culturally as Native Americans, particularly if their maternal line was Native American. Many Native American tribes were organized into matrilineal kinship systems in which children were considered born into the mother's clan and took their social status from her people. Inheritance and descent was figured through the maternal lines.


title: Melungeon

text: Because of the loose terminology and social attitudes to mixed-race persons, the remaining non-reservation American Indians in the Upper South were generally not recorded separately as Indians. They were often gradually reclassified as mulatto or free people of color, especially as generations intermarried with neighbors of African descent. In the early decades of the 20th century, Virginia and some other states passed laws imposing the one-drop rule, requiring all persons to be classified as either white or black. Those of any known African ancestry were to be classified as black, regardless of their appearance and how they self-identified or were known in the community.


title: Melungeon

text: After Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act of 1924, officials went so far as to alter existing birth and marriage records to reclassify as "colored" some mixed-race individuals or families who identified as and had been recorded as "Indian." Those actions destroyed the documented continuity of identity of several Indian communities. The historical documentation of continuity of self-identified Native American families was lost. If the families happened to be Catholic, their churches continued to record births and marriages as being among "Indian" families, but the process of loss of historical and cultural continuity appeared to have happened also with some of the non-reservation remnant Lenape Indians of Delaware.


title: Melungeon

text: According to the "Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture", in his 1950 dissertation, the cultural geographer Edward Price proposed that Melungeons were families descended from free people of color, who were of European and African ancestry, and mixed-race unions between persons of African ancestry and Native Americans in colonial Virginia, whose territory included the modern-day states of Kentucky and West Virginia.


title: Melungeon

text: The families known as "Melungeons" in the 19th century were generally well integrated into the communities in which they lived, but they may still have been affected by racism. Records show that on the whole, they enjoyed the same rights as whites. For example, they held property, voted, and served in the army. Some, such as the Gibsons, owned slaves as early as the 18th century.


title: Melungeon

text: Under the first Tennessee constitution of 1796, male free people of color were allowed to vote. After fears had been raised by the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion, Virginia, Tennessee, and other southern states passed new restrictions on free people of color. By its new constitution of 1834, Tennessee disfranchised free people of color, reduced them to second-class status, and excluded them from the political system.


title: Melungeon

text: In thar period, several Melungeon men were tried in Hawkins County in 1846 for "illegal voting" under suspicion of being black or free men of color and thereby ineligible for voting. They were acquitted, presumably by demonstrating to the court's satisfaction that they had no appreciable black ancestry. Standards were not theby as strict as under the 20th-century "one-drop rule" laws. As in some other cases, racial status was chiefly determined by people testifying as to how the men were perceived by the community and whether they had "acted white" by voting, serving in the militia, or undertaking other common citizens' obligations available to white men:


title: Melungeon

text: After the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, southern whites struggled to regain political power and to re-assert white supremacy over freedmen and traditionally-free families such as the Melungeons. The white Democrat-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws. However, issues of race were often brought to court as a result of arguments about money.


title: Melungeon

text: For example, in 1872, a widowed woman's Melungeon ancestry was assessed in a trial in Hamilton County, Tennessee. The case was brought by relatives of her late husband, who challenged her inheritance of money from him after his death. They questioned the legitimacy of a marriage between a white man and a woman known to be Melungeon and argued that the marriage was not legitimate because the woman was of black ancestry. Based on the testimony of people in the community, the court decided the woman in the case was not of African ancestry or had no such ancestors recently enough to matter.


title: Melungeon

text: During the period of segregation, a North Carolina statute barred "Portuguese" people, presumably Melungeons, as North Carolina does not have a large Portuguese American community, from whites-only schools. However, under that statute the "Portuguese" were not classified as black and were not required to attend black schools.


title: Melungeon

text: Modern anthropological and sociological studies of Melungeon descendants in Appalachia have demonstrated that they have become culturally indistinguishable from their "non-Melungeon" white neighbors by sharing a Baptist religious affiliation and other community features. With changing attitudes and a desire for more work opportunities, numerous descendants of the early Melungeon pioneer families have migrated from Appalachia to make their lives in other parts of the United States.


title: Melungeon

text: In spite of being culturally and linguistically similar to their European neighbors, the multi-racial families were of a sufficiently different physical appearance to provoke speculation as to their identity and origins. In the first half of the 19th century, the pejorative term "Melungeon" began to be applied to these families by local white European-American neighbors. Local "knowledge" or myths soon began to arise about them. According to the historian Pat Elder, the earliest of those was that they were "Indian" (more specifically, "Cherokee"). Jack Goins, an identified Melungeon descendant and researcher, states that the Melungeons claimed to be both Indian and Portuguese. An example was "Spanish Peggy" Gibson, the wife of Vardy Collins.


title: Melungeon

text: A few ancestors may have been of mixed Iberian (Spanish and/or Portuguese) and African origin. The historian Ira Berlin has noted that some early slaves and free blacks of the charter generation in the colonies were "Atlantic Creoles", mixed-race descendants of Iberian workers and African women from slave ports in Africa. Their male descendants grew up bilingual and accompanied Europeans as workers or slaves. The majority of Melungeon early ancestors, who had migrated from Virginia over time, are of northern European and African ancestry given the history of settlement in late-17th- and early-18th-century eastern Virginia. Later generations in Tennessee intermarried with descendants of Scotch-Irish immigrants who arrived in the mid-to-late 18th century and settled in the backcountry before the American Revolution.


title: Melungeon

text: Given historical evidence of Native American settlement patterns, Cherokee Nation descent is highly unlikely for the original Melungeon ancestral families. Those families were formed during the colonial era in the Virginia Tidewater areas, which were not Cherokee territory. Some of their descendants may have later intermarried with isolated individuals of Cherokee or other Native American ancestry in East Tennessee. Melungeons in Graysville, Tennessee claimed Cherokee ancestors.


title: Melungeon

text: In Graysville, the Melungeons strongly deny their Black heritage and explain their genetic differences by claiming to have had Cherokee grandmothers. Many of the local whites also claim Cherokee ancestry and appear to accept the Melungeon claim ...


title: Melungeon

text: In 1999, the historian C. S. Everett hypothesized that John Collins (recorded as a Sapony Indian who was expelled from Orange County, Virginia about January 1743), might be the same man as the Melungeon ancestor John Collins, who was classified as a "mulatto" in 1755 North Carolina records. However, Everett revised that theory after he has discovered evidence that these were two different men named John Collins. Only descendants of the latter man, who was identified as mulatto in the 1755 record in North Carolina, has any proven connection to the Melungeon families of eastern Tennessee.


title: Melungeon

text: Other peoples frequently suggested as Melungeon ancestors are the Black Dutch and the Powhatan Indian group. The Powhatan were an Algonquian-speaking tribe who inhabited eastern Virginia during the initial period of European colonization.


title: Melungeon

text: Speculation about Melungeon origins continued during the 19th and the 20th centuries. Writers recounted folk tales of shipwrecked sailors, lost colonists, hoards of silver, and ancient peoples such as the Carthaginians, or Phoenicians. With each writer, new elements were added to the mythology surrounding the group, and more surnames were added to the list of possible Melungeon ancestors. The journalist Will Allen Dromgoole wrote several articles on the Melungeons in the 1890s.


title: Melungeon

text: In the late 20th century, amateur researchers suggested that the Melungeons' ethnic identity may include ancestors who were Turks and Sephardi (Iberian) Jews. The writers David Beers Quinn and Ivor Noel Hume theorize that the Melungeons were descended from Sephardi Jews who fled the Inquisition and came as sailors to North America. They also say that Francis Drake did not repatriate all of the Turks he saved from the sack of Cartagena, but some came to the colonies. However, Janet Crain notes that there is no written documentation to support that theory.


title: Melungeon

text: The paper on the Melungeon DNA Project, published by Paul Heinegg, Jack Goins, and Roberta Estes in the "Journal of Genetic Genealogy", shows that ancestry of the sample is primarily European and African, with only one person having a Native American paternal haplotype. There is no genetic evidence to support the Turkish or Jewish ancestry theories.


title: Melungeon

text: There are many hypotheses about the etymology of the term "Melungeon". Linguists and many researchers believe that it may have been derived from the French "mélange", meaning mixture, or perhaps "[nous] mélangeons" meaning "[we] mix/mingle". That etymology is also found in several dictionaries. There were numerous French Huguenot immigrants in Virginia from 1700, and the French language could have contributed a term.


title: Melungeon

text: Joanne Pezzullo and Karlton Douglas speculate that a more likely derivation of "Melungeon", related to the dominance of the English language in the colonies, may have been from the now obsolete English word "malengin" (also spelled "mal engin") meaning "guile", "deceit", or "ill intent." It was used by Edmund Spenser as the name of a trickster figure in his epic poem, "The Faerie Queene" (1590–1596), which was popular in Elizabethan England. The phrase "harbored them Melungins" could be equivalent to "harbored someone of ill will" or mean "harbored evil people" without reference to any ethnicity.


title: Melungeon

text: A different explanation traces the word to "malungu" (or "malungo"), a Luso-African word from Angola, meaning "shipmate" and derived from the Kimbundu word "ma'luno", meaning "companion" or "friend." The word, spelled as "Melungo" and "Mulungo", has been found in numerous Portuguese records. It is said to be a derogatory word that was used by Africans for people of Portuguese or other white ancestry. If so, the word was likely brought to America through people of African ancestry.


title: Melungeon

text: Kennedy (1994) speculates that the word derives from the Turkish "melun can" (from Arabic "mal`un jinn" ملعون جنّ), which purportedly means "damned soul." He suggests that at the time, that was a term used by Turks for Muslims who had been captured and enslaved aboard Spanish galleons.


title: Melungeon

text: Some writers try to connect the term "Melungeon" to an ethnic origin of people designated by that term, but there is no basis for that assumption. It appears the name arose as an exonym, which a neighboring people of whatever origin called the multiracial people.


title: Melungeon

text: On October 7, 1840, the polemical "Brownlow's Whig", of Jonesborough, Tennessee, published an article entitled "Negro Speaking!" The publisher referred to a rival Democratic politician with a party in Sullivan County as "an impudent Malungeon from Washington City a scoundrel who is half Negro and half Indian," then as a "free negroe". In that and related articles, he does not identify the Democrat by name.


title: Melungeon

text: The term "Melungeon" was historically considered an insult, a label applied to Appalachians who were by appearance or reputation of mixed-race ancestry. In southwest Virginia, the term "Ramp" was similarly applied to people of mixed race. That term has never shed its pejorative character.


title: Melungeon

text: In December 1943, Virginia State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, sent county officials a letter warning against "colored" families trying to pass as "white" or "Indian" in violation of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He identified specific surnames by county, including "Lee, Smyth and Wise: Collins, Gibson, (Gipson), Moore, Goins, Ramsey, Delph, Bunch, Freeman, Mise, Barlow, Bolden (Bolin), Mullins, Hawkins (chiefly Tennessee Melungeons)". (Lee County, Virginia borders Hancock County, Tennessee.) He directed the offices to reclassify members of certain families as black, which caused the loss for numerous families of documentation in records that showed their continued identification as Native American.


title: Melungeon

text: Different researchers have developed their own lists of the surnames of core Melungeon families. Generally, specific lines within families have to be traced to document such identity. For example, DeMarce (1992) listed Hale as a Melungeon surname.


title: Melungeon

text: By the mid-to-late 19th century, the term Melungeon appeared to have been used most frequently to refer to the biracial families of Hancock County and neighboring areas. Several other uses of the term in the print media, from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, have been collected at the Melungeon Heritage Association Website. The spelling of the term varied widely, as was common for words and names at the time. Eventually, the form "Melungeon" became standard.


title: Melungeon

text: Since the late 1960s, "Melungeon" has been increasingly adopted by individuals who identify with the ethnic group. The shift in meaning may have resulted from the popularity of "Walk Toward the Sunset", a drama written by the playwright Kermit Hunter and produced outdoors. The play was first presented in 1969 in Sneedville, the county seat of Hancock County. Making no claim to historical accuracy, Hunter portrayed the Melungeons as indigenous people of uncertain race who were mistakenly perceived as black by neighboring white settlers. As the drama portrayed Melungeons in a positive, romantic light, many individuals began for the first time to self-identify by that term. Hunter intended for his drama "to improve the socio-economic climate" of Hancock County, and to "lift the Melungeon name 'from shame to the hall of fame'." The play helped revive interest in the history of Melungeons. The civil rights movement and the social changes of the 1960s further contributed to wider acceptance of members of the group. Research in social history and genealogy has documented new facts about people identified as Melungeons.


title: Melungeon

text: Since the mid-1990s, popular interest in the Melungeons has grown tremendously although many descendants have left the region of historical concentration. The writer Bill Bryson devoted the better part of a chapter to them in his "" (1989).


title: Melungeon

text: N. Brent Kennedy, a non-specialist, wrote a book on his claimed Melungeon roots, "The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People" (1994). Kennedy's work was controversial. He identified Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley as Melungeons. He also believed that there were pre-Columbian Welsh and Phoenicians/Carthaginians in North America but dismissed them as related as he thought that Melungeons do not look Welsh and the time span from any Phoenicians in North America to today, which he calculated at 2500 years, would probably not allowed any of their physical appearance to survive. With the advent of the internet, many people are researching family history and the number of people self-identifying as having Melungeon ancestry has increased rapidly, according to Kennedy. Some individuals have begun to self-identify as Melungeons after they had read about the group on a website and discovered their surname on the expanding list of "Melungeon-associated" surnames. Others believe that they have certain "characteristic" physical traits or conditions or assume that a multiracial heritage means they are Melungeon.


title: Melungeon

text: For example, some Melungeons are allegedly identifiable by shovel-shaped incisors, a dental feature more commonly found among Native Americans and Northeast Asians, but not restricted to these peoples. After an unsubstantiated hypothesis, popularized by N. Brent Kennedy, that Melungeons are of Turkish origin, some people have identified as having an enlarged external occipital protuberance, dubbed an "Anatolian bump".


title: Melungeon

text: Academic historians have not found any evidence for this thesis, and it is unsupported by results from the Melungeon DNA Project. As noted before, the analysis shows that Melungeon descendants overwhelmingly have Northern European and African DNA ancestry.


title: Melungeon

text: Internet sites promote the anecdotal claim that Melungeons are more prone to certain diseases, such as sarcoidosis or familial Mediterranean fever. Academic medical centers have noted that neither of those diseases is confined to a single population.


title: Melungeon

text: Kennedy's claims of ancestral connections to that group have been strongly disputed. The professional genealogist and historian Virginia E. DeMarce reviewed his 1994 book and found that Kennedy's documentation of his Melungeon ancestry was seriously flawed. He had a very indistinct definition of Melungeons although the group had been extensively studied and documented by other researchers. She criticized Kennedy for trying to include people who might have had other than Northern European ancestry and said that he did not properly take account of existing historical records or recognized genealogical practice in his research. He claimed to have ancestors who were persecuted for racial reasons. However, she found that his named ancestors were all classified as white in records; held various political offices, which showed that they could vote and were supported by their community; and were landowners. Kennedy responded to her critique in an article of his own.


title: Melungeon

text: The Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians in Kentucky, which is neither federally recognized or state recognized as an Indian tribe, claims that most families in its area who are commonly identified as Melungeon are of partial Native American descent. The organization says their ancestors migrated to the region in the late 18th and the early-to-mid-19th centuries. Most of these families claimed the Ridgetop Shawnee heritage to explain their dark skin and Indian features and to avoid racial persecution. In 2010, the Kentucky General Assembly passed resolutions that acknowledged the civic contributions of the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians to the state.


title: Melungeon

text: The following are other multi-racial groups that at one time were classified as tri-racial isolates. Some identify as Native American and have received state recognition, as have six tribes in Virginia.