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I find it funny that this thread vacillates between making fun of American's for claiming their Irish ancestry and making fun of Americans for calling their ethnicity "American" .
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Apr 7, 2018 13:23
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Hungry posted:I've heard it a lot since I moved to the USA. Most Americans are just keeping track of where their ancestors were from and don't mean anything cultural by it. There are some Americans who express some sort of cultural affiliation with their ancestors and they are often Irish or Italian descendants. They are annoying. It's kind of understandable though because those two ethnic groups were considered undesirable and therefore probably stuck together more than say the Germans. To be honest I don't know why any American would want to be associated with European culture. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Apr 7, 2018 |
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Apr 7, 2018 13:38
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If people are conflating "I'm Irish" and "I'm Irish-American" that would explain it. Those are not at all the same statement to me. A lot of Americans have an interest in their ethnic background since most of us descend from immigrants. It's not something I care about since it was never a thing in my family, and my neighborhood was much different ethnically than me.
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Apr 7, 2018 13:46
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frankenfreak posted:In both maps, the Netherlands annex Northrhine-Westphalia which alone has 17.8 million people in it as well as Hannover and Bremen for over another million taken together. The Netherlands have 17 million today. I suppose some kind of Definitive Answer to this question would need to be found.
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Apr 7, 2018 13:53
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Grand Fromage posted:If people are conflating "I'm Irish" and "I'm Irish-American" that would explain it. Those are not at all the same statement to me. A lot of Americans have an interest in their ethnic background since most of us descend from immigrants. It's not something I care about since it was never a thing in my family, and my neighborhood was much different ethnically than me. Arglebargle III posted:There are some Americans who express some sort of cultural affiliation with their ancestors and they are often Irish or Italian descendants. They are annoying. It's kind of understandable though because those two ethnic groups were considered undesirable and therefore probably stuck together more than say the Germans.
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Apr 7, 2018 15:26
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A Buttery Pastry posted:
Just play kaisereich
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Apr 7, 2018 16:26
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Dreddout posted:Just play kaisereich
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Apr 7, 2018 16:35
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Up until probably the later half of the 20th century, a lot of Americans still lived in ethnic neighborhoods based on the country of origin for their first immigrant ancestors, particularly in certain cities. Even if most of the residents were 2nd and 3rd+ generation American, it would have been very ingrained that their ancestral origin was from a certain European nation and that would have been celebrated and reinforced with things like St Patrick's Day and Columbus Day parades, churches organized around ethnic groups, etc. Even 75 years ago I don't think anyone was thinking "I'm the same as the people still in Ireland" (I think it would have been expressed along the lines of "our cousins back in Ireland" or similar), but for a long time a big part of being American was an awareness and celebration of our immigrant origins. A lot of that is downplayed today as the bulk of European immigration was further in the past, and as politics change, but you can see in the popularity today of DNA/ancestral sites that people in America are still deeply in touch with and interested in their immigrant past.
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Apr 7, 2018 17:06
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There are children of Norwegian immigrants in the US who still speak Norwegian, and often quite archaic variants too, having "missed out" on the developments in the language that happened in the mother country during the past 100 years.
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Apr 7, 2018 18:25
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Germans were considered undesirable enough that their culture and language was stamped out by the government, with some German-adjacent cultures getting hit with the same broad anti-German brush. Because of the two world wars... And then "classic American" became what Germans were, blonde hair blue eyed etc.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:10
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Grevling posted:There are children of Norwegian immigrants in the US who still speak Norwegian, and often quite archaic variants too, having "missed out" on the developments in the language that happened in the mother country during the past 100 years. The same happened in Quebec, Quebecois French is noticeably distinct from Parisian French.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:19
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Ensign Expendable posted:The same happened in Quebec, Quebecois French is noticeably distinct from Parisian French. Would you believe if I told you that the same happened to American English
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Apr 7, 2018 20:26
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UnfortunateSexFart posted:Because of the two world wars...
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Apr 7, 2018 20:28
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Germans were considered undesirable enough that their culture and language was stamped out by the government, with some German-adjacent cultures getting hit with the same broad anti-German brush. My mother's side of the family arrived in the States in the mid 19th century and spoke German at home until the 1940s. My great grandpa got hired at the local POW camp where they put Germans to work in the field as a translator but could barely do his job because the actual Germans were almost incomprehensible to him. He never actually told his employers that though and kept getting that sweet government paycheck until the end of the war. Grevling posted:There are children of Norwegian immigrants in the US who still speak Norwegian, and often quite archaic variants too, having "missed out" on the developments in the language that happened in the mother country during the past 100 years. This show was on local TV in Upper Michigan until 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNHI5gcNzus
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Apr 7, 2018 21:25
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Carbon dioxide posted:It's completely weird to me how Americans so often go: "Yeah my grandmother's cousin's aunt's grandfather was Irish so I'm Irish too!" This is a lot rarer than internet Euros make it sound. 9 times out of 10 when Americans say that sort of thing they actually mean "I have Irish ancestry", not "I am literally an Irishman".
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Apr 7, 2018 22:31
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Phlegmish posted:I don't think that's something they say. It always seemed to me like white Americans are just going through the motions when they mention their European ancestry and it's not something they actually care about, it's just that American culture expects labels, the more the better. Those labels don't actually have to correspond to anything except in a very general symbolic sense. That depends, at least in the Northeast it often does imply some actual substantial cultural differences between other white Americans. Not necessarily much of one (especially the farther from urban centers you go), but there is something there. I'm half WASP, and half Ellis Island Catholic stuff (also known as Southern New England Vanilla), and as absolutely Americanized and third/fourth gen as the Catholic side is? There is still a definite difference in the sides culturally speaking. Of course yeah this isn't saying that the difference is ENGLISHMAN VS IRISHMAN/ITALIANO. It's ...I dunno. New World mutt stuff. Outside the Northeast? Not so sure, like especially the West Coast I think has utterly old-world free white people. Like Southerners at least have a discernible regional culture with some age on it, West Coasters are a whole other blended Americanized thing. A Buttery Pastry posted:I don't think it's so much conflating as thinking the Irish connection of Irish-American is too weak in 99% of Americans that flaunt it, for them to deserve calling themselves anything but simply American. The fact the word has the same structure as for example African-American, which denotes real cultural and societal distinction, probably doesn't help. There's the thing also where you have (especially in the South) lots of Americans with heavy Scots-Irish background. And they don't know what that is at all, and have over time just sort of figured it is the same as plain Irish. So you have people whose ancestry is nowadays Orange Order Ulster Protestants basically going to Dublin to look for their roots lol. Grape fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Apr 7, 2018 |
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Apr 7, 2018 22:37
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Ancestry in America can often be tied to when your ancestors got off the boat. A WASP will usually have a older New World family tree than an Italian American simply because the WASP's family got off the Mayflower whereas the Italians came over during the early 20th century. Even among Protestant whites, there's a bit of a cultural gap between the Yankee whose family has lived in New England for centuries, and the Midwestern German who immigrated much later. America's not homogeneous, yo.
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Apr 7, 2018 23:29
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A few years back I was wiki-ing around the various ethnicgroup-american articles and ended up on the english american page and I remember the census data amusing me the decline and fall of the english-american in just a few decades. rest in piss.
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Apr 7, 2018 23:37
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Dreddout posted:Ancestry in America can often be tied to when your ancestors got off the boat. Yep, I know exactly the villages my Irish and Italian Great-Grandparents came from. The WASP side? lol, they are from England and that's about as accurate as that gets. cool new Metroid game posted:A few years back I was wiki-ing around the various ethnicgroup-american articles and ended up on the english american page and I remember the census data amusing me It's hard to quantify that statistically. Southerners being the main reason I think, since lots of them don't identify with anything specific Europe wise, and will answer "American" on these kind of polls. But shitloads of them would be English in ancestry, especially the lowland South. In other cases if you have someone who has English ancestry but other Euro ancestry? The other stuff generally has a more pronounced cultural imprint in their identity, due to usually being more recent. So someone with WASP and Italian ancestry might more heavily identify with Italian and answer just that on polls. Since the Italian is still distinctly flavored and "real" for lack of a better word, while the English ancestry has long since homogenized into generic white American. Grape fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Apr 7, 2018 |
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Apr 7, 2018 23:42
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Flayer posted:If Germany had let the Austro-Hungarian empire collapse in 1914, as it was going to anyway, they would probably have around double the population and land area they do now. Of all the poor decisions German leadership made from 1885 to the end of WW2, the one to trigger WW1 must be by far the worst, both nationally and for the other nations of Europe. It's impossible to say what would have happened next but for one the Nazis would certainly have never existed in the way that they did. Germany politically wasn't intrinsically any worse than the other European empires at the time and at this point in time decolonisation and the rise of democracy would likely be similar to now. I think it showcases the fundamental weakness of absolute monarchy, sometimes when you roll the dice you get a really lovely leader like Kaiser WIlhelm II who gets to do whatever they want for decades at a time. One nice side benefit for native English speakers of this not happening has been English becoming the lingua franca of the world culturally, scientifically, academically etc. Prior to WW1 German was the dominant language in a lot of the hard sciences. A larger, more populous Germany would only have reinforced that. Add in no WW1 and WW2 victories for the UK & US and English would have been far less of the global language it is today. In regards to American ethnicity I don't think most Europeans have a huge problem with Americans saying "I'm Irish-American" or "I'm Italian-American". Hyphenations are fine, they're an American trying to show their ancestry and/or unique ethnic subset of American culture. Its the many, many Americans who gormlessly feel the need to say outright "I'm IRISH" or "I'm ITALIAN" to actual Irish or Italian people that get Europeans rolling their eyes. Its really not that rare at all, unfortunately.
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Apr 7, 2018 23:55
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Germans were considered undesirable enough that their culture and language was stamped out by the government, with some German-adjacent cultures getting hit with the same broad anti-German brush. only in a token sense, german origin is still the largest single source of heritage for americans. german-american festivals are kind of a big deal in most of america, even if it is like most 'ethnic' holidays an excuse to get lovely drunk in public. it's just that irish and italian heritage is more visible in cities, being more recent and concentrated there, where germans mostly settled the vast american frontier Grape posted:This is a lot rarer than internet Euros make it sound. its mostly americans trying to make themselves seem more interesting, or ones who have a grandparent from the old country and thus still feel some tenuous personal connection even if it's mostly washed out. at this point many white americans are 4+ generations removed from another national heritage
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Apr 8, 2018 03:37
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boner confessor posted:only in a token sense, german origin is still the largest single source of heritage for americans. german-american festivals are kind of a big deal in most of america, even if it is like most 'ethnic' holidays an excuse to get lovely drunk in public. it's just that irish and italian heritage is more visible in cities, being more recent and concentrated there, where germans mostly settled the vast american frontier Yep, Irish and Italians (and Poles and Jews) came in during the start and height of the second industrial revolution, and the economy that went with it. Cities were the huge economic draw at the time in terms of labor opportunity. So they stayed and mostly concentrated themselves throughout Northeastern cities, and a few industrial Midwestern ones. Whereas the notable German waves all came before that, when the draw was the frontier and available farmland. Same with the Scots-Irish, who became basically the basis of Appalachian culture among other things. quote:its mostly americans trying to make themselves seem more interesting, or ones who have a grandparent from the old country and thus still feel some tenuous personal connection even if it's mostly washed out. at this point many white americans are 4+ generations removed from another national heritage Around where I am it's not quite so irrelevant and washed out (northeast), but that aside honestly I think as silly as it gets that it's a healthier thing than embracing monolithic whiteness as identity. An immigration self-history interested America is one that pulls in the opposite direction of the neo-nativist nightmare we're facing right now.
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Apr 8, 2018 04:54
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Grape posted:In other cases if you have someone who has English ancestry but other Euro ancestry? The other stuff generally has a more pronounced cultural imprint in their identity, due to usually being more recent. So someone with WASP and Italian ancestry might more heavily identify with Italian and answer just that on polls. Since the Italian is still distinctly flavored and "real" for lack of a better word, while the English ancestry has long since homogenized into generic white American. I know twin sisters, both from Pennsylvania Coal Country, and I mostly knew one first and she hardcore identified as Polish. Serious Catholic, took Polish in college, went to Poland for school trips. I was hanging out with her twin in Baltimore, and we decided to go to Little Italy for dinner, and I get a whole spiel from the sister about how hardcore Italian-American her heritage is. It was pretty hilarious coming from twins. quote:Outside the Northeast? Not so sure, like especially the West Coast I think has utterly old-world free white people. Like Southerners at least have a discernible regional culture with some age on it, West Coasters are a whole other blended Americanized thing. I had always assumed that American dialects were coalescing into a monolith, especially with dialects like Brooklyn and Louisiana Yat slowly fading into obscurity and seen mostly in old films. But I was quite surprised to find that according to actual linguists, West Coast English is actually evolving in a separate direction from the rest of the US. My brother lives in LA (raised in the Midwest), and while not aware of this on an academic level is pulling his hair out about it on a personal level. He was pissed off recently because his Californian wife and her friends were discussing someone named "Don" and a few sentences in he realizes they're talking about a woman named "Dawn". West Coast has the "cot/caught merger" where a lot of vowel blends get distilled down to one vowel, so they don't consider Don/Dawn to be pronounced differently. I've explained it as an academic point, but it still drives my brother crazy, and baffles Californians that he's noticing any difference from any other dialect of English since to them it's invisible. I was also raised in the Midwest, and it wasn't until I joined the military that I realized I have a vowel difference most other Americans don't. I pronounce "root" and "roof" *not* as though they rhyme with "loot" and "proof", but with sound that makes "root" close to rhyming with "foot". So despite a lot of media standardization, not only are some American dialects still very separate, some are actually moving *further* away from other regions of American English. EDIT: "Yat" is a really fascinating dialect, mostly known for "that weird Brooklyn thing some Southerners inexplicably do." You notice it in a few films like Benjamin Button and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but probably the most well-known example is the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Proud Mary: "big wheels keep on toinin', Proud Mary keep on boinin'." Though CCR was apparently really hamming it up trying to work a regional dialect. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 05:14
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One of the strangest things that's happened in American English in the last 50 years is the ever increasing pervasiveness of a twang and drawl in the speech of any rural person, no matter where they live. Upstate New York, North Dakota, backwoods Michigan, East Washington, they're all starting to work on this country accent that takes its cues from the Southeast. It's very odd.
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Apr 8, 2018 05:22
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:One of the strangest things that's happened in American English in the last 50 years is the ever increasing pervasiveness of a twang and drawl in the speech of any rural person, no matter where they live. Upstate New York, North Dakota, backwoods Michigan, East Washington, they're all starting to work on this country accent that takes its cues from the Southeast. It's very odd. i code switch and my partially inauthentic southern drawl comes out stronger when i'm drunk or emotional it's just a more casual method of speaking, like wearing sweatpants in public
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Apr 8, 2018 05:24
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boner confessor posted:i code switch and my partially inauthentic southern drawl comes out stronger when i'm drunk or emotional No, it's not casual, because it's a signifier that you wear on your sleeve, and it's done specifically to differentiate yourself from others, and it's not natural.
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Apr 8, 2018 05:34
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if you say so, guy who has never heard me speak irl and never will
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Apr 8, 2018 05:42
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:One of the strangest things that's happened in American English in the last 50 years is the ever increasing pervasiveness of a twang and drawl in the speech of any rural person, no matter where they live. Upstate New York, North Dakota, backwoods Michigan, East Washington, they're all starting to work on this country accent that takes its cues from the Southeast. It's very odd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPuS1XoRoJs quote:EDIT: "Yat" is a really fascinating dialect, mostly known for "that weird Brooklyn thing some Southerners inexplicably do." You notice it in a few films like Benjamin Button and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but probably the most well-known example is the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Proud Mary: "big wheels keep on toinin', Proud Mary keep on boinin'." Though CCR was apparently really hamming it up trying to work a regional dialect. Yats from part of New Orleans right? I think honestly it's just.... more Italians lol. Italians whose boat over got crazy lost on the over to New York. And I guess if you get some Italians together and plop them into an Anglo speaking area they just naturally start sounding like Brooklyn after awhile. Grape fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 05:44
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cool new Metroid game posted:A few years back I was wiki-ing around the various ethnicgroup-american articles and ended up on the english american page and I remember the census data amusing me I always find it puzzling that, in spite of inventing the country, you don't hear much about English Americans when people talk about the ethnic background of the country. This graph shows just how watery the definition is, unless there was some horrific genocide over the 80s and 90s that we all forgot about. I wish I knew more about immigration from England to America and the number of people who have direct roots to the country in America today. Also, they all seem concentrated in Utah for some reason, is there some Mormon thing going on to bring people over from England or something?! khwarezm fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 06:03
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khwarezm posted:I always find it puzzling that, in spite of inventing the country, you don't hear much about English Americans when people talk about the ethnic background of the country. This graph shows just how watery the definition is, unless there was some horrific genocide over the 80s and 90s that we all forgot about. I wish I knew more about immigration from England to America and the number of people who have direct roots to the country in America today. It's just people who want to be -american and don't have an easy one like being black or their name having seven consonants in a row. If you want to get specific almost every american is "english-american" somewhere in there except natives.
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Apr 8, 2018 07:04
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Peanut President posted:It's just people who want to be -american and don't have an easy one like being black or their name having seven consonants in a row. If you want to get specific almost every american is "english-american" somewhere in there except natives. Based on just speaking English you mean? Somebody pull up a chart, but I'm pretty sure that successive non-English waves of US immigration are pretty substantial, so my understanding is the plurality of white Americans are genuinely descended from a plurality of non-English people. For one thing, just look at the sheer number of Irish, German, French, Slavic, etc. surnames Americans have. Especially when you factor in that a lot of people changed their names to assimilate, that alone points out that a ton of people are patrilineally descended from non-English people. Somewhere in this very thread I think we had an animated map showing streams of little balls going from other countries to the US, and you could watch it over time as the year advances and the little balls start coming from different sources.
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Apr 8, 2018 07:23
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Pulled up a few snippets from Wikipedia. Prior to 1790 the bulk of immigrants were English, and from Independence to 1830 immigration was pretty slow since we weren't an overly promising country to immigrate to (Canada actually had okay immigration numbers since they were still with the Empire). After 1830 things started kicking in, but when you look at the numbers the Brits are well below the Irish and later Germans, and unless there's some historical point where the Brits suddenly got hot and bothered to immigrate here, I think it's safe to extrapolate those trends further into the later 19th century and especially 20th century (when Brits had a ton of other places to move to): quote:Based on available records, immigration totaled 8,385 in 1820, with immigration totals gradually increasing to 23,322 by the year 1830; for the 1820s decade immigration more than doubled to 143,000. Between 1831 and 1840, immigration more than quadrupled to a total of 599,000. These included about 207,000 Irish, starting to emigrate in large numbers following Britain's easing of travel restrictions, and about 152,000 Germans, 76,000 British, and 46,000 French, constituting the next largest immigrant groups of the decade. So the British don't look necessarily small, but when you combine the other groups, often in much narrower windows than the 1850–1930 given for 3.5 million Brits, you can see that there's a fair bit of European variety coming in. Then you start counting Hispanics (both in territories we absorbed and later immigrants), and then of course the 1960s came and immigration policy got totally reworked and we started getting people from everywhere. So yeah, the Brits were the largest group at Independence, but then immigration was really slow until 1830, and even as early as 1830 the Brits quickly became a minority of immigrants compared to the other European groups coming in.
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Apr 8, 2018 07:35
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:No, it's not casual, because it's a signifier that you wear on your sleeve, and it's done specifically to differentiate yourself from others, and it's not natural. Why don't you just speak normal 'Merican like the rest of us? It's unnatural to use dialect and accent to differentiate yourself! (Since Boner Confessor actually lives in the South I doubt this has anything to do with differentiation and more to do with subconscious speech pattern matching. I did the same thing when I lived in Atlanta, and I do the same thing now that I live in Hawaii.) Not sure if this has been posted here before: http://aschmann.net/AmEng/  My favorite bit is the little green spot around Wasilla, Alaska. That's where farmers from Minnesota were resettled during the Great Depression and caused Sarah Palin to have a totally different accent than most Alaskans. Stickman fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 08:15
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khwarezm posted:Also, they all seem concentrated in Utah for some reason, is there some Mormon thing going on to bring people over from England or something?! England was a very fertile target of missionary activity for the early LDS Church, so a disproportionate number of their early members were English immigrants. And then of course, polygamy means that an even more disproportionate number of Utahns are descended from those early English immigrant members. The other element here is that Mormons are obsessed with genealogical research, so they're much more likely to identify their specific ancestry, as opposed to the Southern approach of "I dunno, we're just Americans".
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Apr 8, 2018 08:36
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Blut posted:One nice side benefit for native English speakers of this not happening has been English becoming the lingua franca of the world culturally, scientifically, academically etc. Prior to WW1 German was the dominant language in a lot of the hard sciences. A larger, more populous Germany would only have reinforced that. Add in no WW1 and WW2 victories for the UK & US and English would have been far less of the global language it is today. It's likely that German (still) would have been a lingua franca in much of Eastern Europe, at least. It's hard not to feel that Hitler hosed up even, or especially, if you're a German nationalist. Grape posted:That depends, at least in the Northeast it often does imply some actual substantial cultural differences between other white Americans. Not necessarily much of one (especially the farther from urban centers you go), but there is something there. I read something a while ago about there still being a few Irish-American neighborhoods in New York City. I remember being surprised at that, as I associated it with a bygone era. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:No, it's not casual, because it's a signifier that you wear on your sleeve, and it's done specifically to differentiate yourself from others, and it's not natural. Register switching is natural. Virtually everyone does it. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 16:27
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Apr 8, 2018 17:08
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Flayer posted:If Germany had let the Austro-Hungarian empire collapse in 1914, as it was going to anyway, they would probably have around double the population and land area they do now. Of all the poor decisions German leadership made from 1885 to the end of WW2, the one to trigger WW1 must be by far the worst, both nationally and for the other nations of Europe. It's impossible to say what would have happened next but for one the Nazis would certainly have never existed in the way that they did. Germany politically wasn't intrinsically any worse than the other European empires at the time and at this point in time decolonisation and the rise of democracy would likely be similar to now. I think it showcases the fundamental weakness of absolute monarchy, sometimes when you roll the dice you get a really lovely leader like Kaiser WIlhelm II who gets to do whatever they want for decades at a time. A bit late, but I wanted to stress that a) Imperial Germany was very much *not* an absolute monarchy. It was a constitutional monarchy whose constitution admittedly gave the Kaiser a lot of power, but also placed some checks and limitations on said power; and b) Wilhelm was as much a product of his time as everybody else. It's tempting to see the whole WW1 business as just a monarch running amok after good ol' Bismarck was booted out, but the fact is that by the late 19th century Germany was gripped by a particularly ugly combination of extreme nationalism, militarism and wannabe imperialism. This was something that was observable all over Europe, that's true, but the specific social, political and historical context made the situation especially toxic in Germany (Austria-Hungary too, though the rampant nationalism here didn't serve to unify society, but tore the empire apart instead). In fact, there were plenty of instances were Germany's extreme right criticised the Kaiser for being "too soft"; the buildup to WW1 is also a tale of Wilhelm "radicalising" himself, so to speak, in order to regain the favour he had lost with the nationalist crowd. There were a lot of factors playing into the hellish disaster that was 1914-1918, but by far the largest was the downright nasty thoughts and sentiments that were widespread in the streets and palaces of Berlin and Vienna. e: There's an amazing book (Hitler's Vienna by Brigitte Hamann) that details not only the oft-overlooked Viennese part of Hitler's biography, but also explores the extremely volatile political situation of the time, with nationalists from all corners of the Empire, hardcore racists and antisemites, communists, radical social democrats staunch monarchists and Catholic and Protestant fanatics all clashing together in a city marked by extreme social tensions, ruled over by an elderly monarch who increasingly lost all connection to daily reality. I'm told that the translation is pretty bad, though. System Metternich fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 17:15
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One of my favorite books ever - Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930's - was something I read for one of my Weimar/WWII centric grad seminars and it covered German nationalism and political breakdowns in really interesting detail, but my favorite chapter is "The Death of Red Vienna", which illustrates at considerable length how polarized Austrian politics were between the world wars. It is a really fantastic read and the Viennese communists put up a considerable resistance to the governmental forces, led by incompetent fascist Engelbert Dolfuss, who was hilariously owned by the Nazis because he was an Austrian Nazi nationalist and not a fan of anschluss, iirc. One major part of Vienna was the working class neighborhood/housing development of Karl Marx Hof which was loving massive, even by contemporary standards (larger than modern designed subsidized housing that tries not to concentrate poverty in theory, if not in practice), and filled with left-wing factory workers and their families. Viennese communists fortified the entire place and fought a pitched battle with government forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx-Hof Depressing how Nazi extermination policies managed to completely eviscerate what had been a substantial and growing left wing movement in German-speaking countries. If only the German left hadn't hosed up at like every turn bonus: the austrofascist dictator engelbert dollfuss was loving tiny, and people often made fun of how he looked in Liederhosen (which was hilariously popular with austrian fascists lol). He's on the left 
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Apr 8, 2018 18:56
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Frog Act posted:One of my favorite books ever - Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930's - was something I read for one of my Weimar/WWII centric grad seminars and it covered German nationalism and political breakdowns in really interesting detail, but my favorite chapter is "The Death of Red Vienna", which illustrates at considerable length how polarized Austrian politics were between the world wars. It is a really fantastic read and the Viennese communists put up a considerable resistance to the governmental forces, led by incompetent fascist Engelbert Dolfuss, who was hilariously owned by the Nazis because he was an Austrian Nazi nationalist and not a fan of anschluss, iirc. A fun fact about the Karl-Marx-Hof battle: The commander who led the Austrian army's charge against the Hof, Karl Biedermann, later on fought with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union only to join a resistance group that passed on information about German deployments in and around Vienna and (futilely) tried to take control of the city so that they could let the Red Army take it without any further bloodshed. The man who once fought for the Austrian fascists against communists was executed by German fascists for cooperating with communists.
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Apr 8, 2018 19:22
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khwarezm posted:I always find it puzzling that, in spite of inventing the country, you don't hear much about English Americans when people talk about the ethnic background of the country. This graph shows just how watery the definition is, unless there was some horrific genocide over the 80s and 90s that we all forgot about. I wish I knew more about immigration from England to America and the number of people who have direct roots to the country in America today. Mormons originated generally from New England stock, and in Upstate New York. The other area that pops up big on English ancestry maps is northern New England, the part that wasn't swamped by Catholic immigrants 100 years back. See also my comments on the South. Phlegmish posted:I read something a while ago about there still being a few Irish-American neighborhoods in New York City. I remember being surprised at that, as I associated it with a bygone era. There are concentrations of Catholic immigrant pops all throughout the Northeast, they're not gonna be off the boat generally? But the people there basically didn't fan out into the suburbs quite as much as the rest of us with that ancestry. So there is generally more distinction from the more homogenized and mixed Irish-Americans and what have you. Unfortunately these areas tend to be racist and GOP voting also.... see Staten Island, South Boston etc. Then you have stuff like Astoria Queens that was the same deal except with Greek-Americans, that actually HAS started adding off the boat Greeks again since the financial meltdown back in the old country. Grape fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 19:43
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