"In the summer of 1933, a man named Adolf Hitler is the new and powerful anti-Semitic chancellor of Germany. But in Los Angeles, no-nonsense secretary Liesl Weiss has concerns much closer to home. The Great Depression is tightening its grip and Liesl is the sole supporter of two children, an opinionated mother, and a troubled brother. Leon Lewis is a Jewish lawyer who has watched Adolf Hitler's rise to power--and the increase in anti-Semitism in America--with...

A monumental American novel about one man's rise from life as a penniless immigrant to the head of a family empire In the tradition of great writers like Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck, John Jakes crafts a sweeping family drama. In late-nineteenth-century Chicago, the tragedies and triumphs of the Crowns illustrate the power of the American Dream. As immigrants to America, their turbulent story spans a decade marked by the vicious Pullman Strike,...

Surveys German history, customs and people and describes the contributions of German immigrants in the United States.

Brief introduction to German Americans, their reasons for immigrating to the United States, customs and traditions, and their impact on American society.

The continuing saga of the Crowns of Chicago, a family founded by a German immigrant who became a beer baron. The protagonists are an actress in Hollywood, a filmmaker documenting World War I and a college dropout who races cars for Henry Ford. By the author of Homeland.

A novel of two brothers from the end of World War II to the 1960's. The story of Rudolph, Gretchen, and Thomas Jordache, children of an embittered German immigrant. Nurtured on traditional views of American success, each pursues the illusion of happiness in his own way, determined to achieve his "birthright."

In 1914, Andrew Houghton’s family is one of hundreds eking out an existence in the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania. Though he longs to be a veterinarian, he’s fated for a life underground, picking rock alongside his father. That destiny changes when his aunt, Eveline Kiser, arranges for her husband to secure Andrew an apprenticeship on the railroad. Wilhelm Kiser, a German immigrant, has found his American dream in Pittsburgh, with a well-paying...

Looks at how U.S. presidents from Wilson to George W. Bush have suspended or revoked guaranteed freedoms in the country during times of war, and includes first-person stories and illustrations.

Louisiana, 1843: a German immigrant thinks she recognizes a young slave girl as the long-lost daughter of her German friend, but the girl has no memory of such a past, and her owner refuses to free her. In novelistic detail, historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an "infernal motley crew" of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. The dramatic trial offers...

From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children to a family internment camp in Texas. Crystal City was the center of a government program called "quiet passage," under which hundreds were exchanged for more important Americans held behind enemy lines. Jan Jarboe Russell details a little-known story of how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war....