German Heritage in Letters

03/21/2022

Join us this Wednesday, March 23rd, when we'll launch our new home, "Migrant Connections"! This Zoom event will include remarks by colleagues from the German Historical Institute, our partners at the Goethe Institute USA and the German Embassy in Washington, and a roundtable discussion with academic researchers, citizen scholars, and family historians! More details and registration information here:

The German Historical Institute Washington is a center for advanced historical research. Working with junior and senior scholars around the world, the GHI facilitates dialogue and collaboration across national and disciplinary boundaries.

02/14/2022

Does your family have German immigrant letters to share with our project? We continue to welcome contributions! Read more here, or email [email protected] for further details...

German Heritage in Letters is a project to create a digital collection of German-language correspondence currently held in private hands, by archives, by special collection libraries, museums, and other institutions. The project is managed by the German Historical Institute of Washington DC, a resea...

02/11/2022

Our friends at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies are starting a Kurrentschrift transcription group next month! For more details and to sign up, visit the link below.

Can you read the Old German script/ Kurrent? Do you enjoy deciphering historic texts? Would you like to learn more about the German-American experience? Join the new Kurrent transcription group at the Max Kade Institute! Modeled after a similar group at …

01/21/2022

Our project is featured in the latest edition of SPIEGEL Geschichte! To learn more visit:

Mehr als 400 Millionen Briefe schrieben Amerika-Auswanderer und Daheimgebliebene einander. Die Forscherinnen Jana Keck und Simone Lässig berichten, wie sie den Schatz heben wollen.

10/13/2021

"Reflecting on German Heritage in the United States in the 21st Century" was a panel discussion put together earlier this year by our colleagues in collaboration with The German Society of Pennsylvania. It featured Dr. Sarah Panter of the Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, discussing “Transatlantic Families. The Lives of German Revolutionary Emigres, 1848/49–1914” and Dr. Sebastian Bondzio, Gerda Henkel Research Fellow in Digital History at the German Historical Institute and the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, discussing “Researching German Migration to the United States by Mining Historical Big Data.” The discussion was moderated by German Historical Institute Research Fellow Jana Keck. Watch their talks online here!

Dr. Sarah Panter, Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, “Transatlantic Families. The Lives of German Revolutionary Emigres, 18...

10/08/2021

The Great broke out 150 years ago today. In this letter, written a few weeks afterward, drawn from the collections of the Newberry Library, German immigrant Hermann Raster shared with his sister in Anhalt the story of his attempt to save a painting of his late wife from being consumed by the flames...

German Heritage in Letters is a project to create a digital collection of German-language correspondence currently held in private hands, by archives, by special collection libraries, museums, and other institutions. The project is managed by the German Historical Institute of Washington DC, a resea...

09/16/2021

Some exciting news to share: coming soon, we'll have a new look and a new name! Project team member Jana Keck previews our new digital history research hub "Migrant Connections," which will allow us to collaborate with citizen scientists in new ways and also enable us to expand the variety of sources we use for research into the migrant experience.

How do Citizen Humanities projects develop? And how have such endeavors changed over the course of the last decades? One of the research areas of the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI) focuses on the intersection of Digital History and German Migration to the United States.

09/03/2021

Congratulations to Judy W. from Illinois, the winner of our most recent book contest! She shared with us a collection of letters written by Gustav Grupe of Hamburg to his immigrant relatives in Connecticut. We look forward to sharing these letters with our researchers and we’re continuing to seek more — to find out how to enter visit our contest page at https://germanletters.org/share/book-contest!

07/15/2021

Sometimes, our citizen-scholar volunteers exceed our expectations and decide to learn more about the people and places mentioned in the letters they work on. We interviewed two members of the transcription group from Saarland we profiled previously, Eva Tietjen and Regina Kunz, about their research from Germany on the letters we have collected here in the United States. Read more: https://germanletters.org/news/above-and-beyond

06/22/2021

Does your family have old German immigrant letters? Our project is gathering letters sent to immigrants from Germany from the 1800s to the 1920s. We would love to hear from families who have preserved this historic material and are interested in sharing their stories with others. With support from Wunderbar Together we are offering a book contest prize to contributors who share their collections with us. Learn more by visiting germanletters.org/share/book-contest!

06/22/2021

German Heritage in Letters depends on the assistance of citizen scholars, from family historians who share letters they've preserved to volunteer transcribers who transform digitized letters into machine-readable text. One group of volunteer transcribers have been working together online since last spring and we reached out to interview them about how they became interested in historical transcription, how they work on letters together, and what they've learned about family life in 19th-century Germany. Read the full interview by Yella Nicklaus online now!

German Heritage in Letters is a project to create a digital collection of German-language correspondence currently held in private hands, by archives, by special collection libraries, museums, and other institutions. The project is managed by the German Historical Institute of Washington DC, a resea...