An aborted reformation: Germans and the papacy in the mid-fifteenth century

Why did the Reformation not occur in mid-fifteenth century Germany? The Germans had already become very angry with the papacy, and began a movement to force the curia to allow them to reform their own Church in their own way. The curia, which had its own plans for reform, of course refused. Each side began to develop weapons; but the struggle, which came close to a crisis, quickly fizzled. I maintain that the reason was that the Germans, who detested heresy, were unable to focus their anger against the curia sufficiently to carry out their program, chiefly because localism was so strong that no program could be agreed on for more than a few months. The event that brought about the crisis was the Turkish advance in Europe, which both the papacy and the Germans wished to use for their own purposes. Gradually the incipient revolt simmerend down, but the underlying causes remained. Fifty years later, this anger was able to achieve direction, and the stored-up feeling, now focussed, was able to explode.     

Germans from Russia in Saskatchewan: An Oral History

The Germans from Russia are a prominent settlement group in the rural landscape of Saskatchewan. Perhaps because they came incrementally, by chain migration, rather than by organized group colonization, they compose an ethnic group little noticed by historians. Also, their immediate origins are divided, inasmuch as earlier German-Russian immigrants came directly from Russia, whereas many twentieth-century German-Russian immigrants came to Canada from the United States, mainly from North Dakota and South Dakota. This article offers the first focused, scholarly historical treatment of German-Russian immigration and life in Saskatchewan. Drawing on oral histories collected with the support of the Faculty Research Program of the Canadian Embassy, it focuses particularly on growing up German-Russian on the prairies, positing a German-Russian ethnic identity distinct both from neighbor immigrant groups in Saskatchewan and from origin communities in the United States.     

More than a photo: Germans from Russia remember their familial relationships

Most narrators of the Dakota Memories Oral History Project (DMOHP), the children and grandchildren of ethnic German immigrants from Russia, reminisce a great deal about their family relationships -- grandparent-grandchild relationships, parent-child relationships, and sibling-sibling relationships. They share memories of their grandmothers baking them delicious dough dishes, of their fathers making them labor endlessly in the fields, and of their siblings coaxing them into mischief. Through these relationships, Germans from Russia not only learned about their ethnic group's identity, but they also reshaped it into a new identity, blending their past with their present. Within the context of family relationships, these German Russian descendants forged a new identity rooted in their ethnic heritage and history, but serviceable to new, American-born generations.