"The Pennsylvania German Lutheran and Reformed populations of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Appalachian backcountry successfully combined elements of their Old World tradition with several emerging versions of national identity. Many took up democratic populist rhetoric to defend local cultural particularity and ethnic separatism. Others wedded certain American notions of reform and national purpose to Continental traditions of clerical authority and idealized German virtues.

Their experience illustrates how creating and defending an ethnic identity can itself be a way of becoming American. Though they would maintain a remarkably stable and identifiable subculture well into the twentieth century, Pennsylvania Germans were, even by the eve of the Civil War, the most "inside" of "outsiders." They demonstrate the complex and often paradoxical ways in which many Americans have managed the process of assimilation to their own advantage.

Given their pioneering role in that process, their story illuminates the path that other immigrants and ethnic Americans would travel in the decades to follow."--BOOK JACKET.