Hermann Wellenreuther was a Professor of Modern History at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. His scholarship explores early modern German, English, and North American history. His research delves into the pursuit of peace and prosperity during the eighteenth century.
Examines German broadsides published in America from 1730 to 1830. Through them, explores aspects of the German-American world, including printing, religious practices, social life, politics, education, farming, economics, and medicine.
Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg (1711–1787), born in Einbeck, Lower Saxony, and sent as Lutheran pastor by Gotthilf August Francke, Director of the Hallesche Stiftungen, in 1742 to Pennsylvania, is considered the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in the United States. The essays presented in The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century analyze the world and achievements of the German pastor. In order to evaluate Mühlenberg’s accomplishments as well as his failings the first five contributors focus on Mühlenberg’s time in Europe and especially on his educational and religious experiences in Einbeck and in Halle as well as his theology studies at Göttingen and his times in Halle as teacher that shaped his later experiences in the US. In Pennsylvania Mühlenberg had to confront a legal framework different from Europe, with fierce political infighting that pitted Lutherans and Anglicans against Peace Churches and pastors with attacks from within their own congregations and the Pennsylvania German press dominated by the hostile Saur family. In these difficult and then revolutionary times Mühlenberg came to conclude that a “great gulf” had opened between the Old World he remembered and what he experienced in the New World. With the adoption of a Kirchenordnung (congregational constitution) of 1762 by several Lutheran congregations, the religious and then the secular worlds of governance shifted dramatically for the transplanted European Lutherans. The Declaration of Independence stripped his connections to Pietistic Germany and the strong-willed pious and Pietistic Lutheran Pastor died in 1787 in a world dedicated to establishing a new secular constitutional order.
Jacob Leisler emigrated to the Dutch colony of Nieu Nederlandt in North America in 1660. He was the son of a Reformed minister and hailed from Frankfurt on the Main. To posterity Jacob Leisler is known for his role during the Glorious Revolution in 1689 as rebel against the English governor of the colony of New York - for which he was cruelly put to death in 1691. The essays in this collection show that Leisler's world had many more faces and sides: there is the military aspect of Leisler's career, the mercantile world in which Leisler lived (and was captured by Algerian pirates), the religious world that got him into a fierce fight with a Dutch-Reformed pastor, and finally the larger political and economic context that ranges from a study of the role of the little port of Dover (England) to the larger issues related to the role of colonies in the Atlantic economy and the British Empire. A number of general themes hold the essays together: Two are of particular importance: The Atlantic nature of religion and the transnational character of the Atlantic economy. Most of the essays were presentations to a workshop held at the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change at the National University of Ireland in Galway.
Edited by Hermann Wellenreuther, this book sees legal, political and social historians compare the constitutional histories of Germany and the United States, concentrating on Federalism, the idea of a ruler, civil rights, national unity and change in industrial societies that affected the development of their respective constitutions. The authors identify relevant factors common to both countries and explain why their respective developments diverged.Germany and the USA - The Krefeld Historical Symposia