German Americans in the context of "Nativism in United States politics"

Texas Germans (German: Texas-Deutsche) are descendants of German Americans who settled in Texas from the 1830s. The arriving Germans tended to cluster in ethnic enclaves; most settled in a broad, fragmented belt across the south-central part of the state, where many became farmers. As of 1990, about three million Texans considered themselves German in ancestry.

Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States. U.S. federal law does not equate nationality with race or ethnicity but rather with citizenship. The U.S. has 37 ancestry groups with more than one million individuals. White Americans form the largest racial and ethnic group at 61.6% of the U.S. population, with non-Hispanic Whites making up 57.8% of the population. Hispanic and Latino Americans form the second-largest group and are 18.7% of the American population. Black Americans constitute the country's third-largest ancestry group and are 12.4% of the total U.S. population. Asian Americans are the country's fourth-largest group, composing 6% of the American population. The country's 3.7 million Native Americans account for about 1.1%, and some 574 native tribes are recognized by the federal government. People of American descent can be found internationally. As many as seven million Americans are estimated to be living abroad, and make up the American diaspora.

The majority of Americans trace their roots to immigrants who arrived in what is now the United States, starting with European colonization in the 16th century. This includes diverse groups such as the English, Irish, Germans, Italians, and others, as well as Africans forcibly brought as slaves during the Atlantic slave trade. However, the Native American population, whose ancestors inhabited the continent for thousands of years before European contact, are a key exception.

The demography of Germany is monitored by the Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Statistical Office of Germany). According to the most recent data, Germany's population is 83,577,140 (31 December 2024) making it the most populous country in the European Union and the nineteenth-most populous country in the world. The total fertility rate was rated at 1.38 in 2023, significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1. For a long time Germany had one of the world's lowest fertility rates of around 1.3 to 1.4. Due to the low birth rate Germany has recorded more deaths than births every year since 1972, which means 2024 was the 53rd consecutive year the German population would have decreased without immigration. However, due to immigration the population has actually increased during the last half-century. In 2023 the number of people with a foreign background was 29.7%; this category includes foreigners, naturalized citizens, ethnic German repatriates from Eastern Europe and the children of all of the above.

Until the early 20th century Germany was also a large emigrant nation; in the 19th century more than 5 million citizens of the German Empire emigrated to the US alone, and in the early 20th century Germany lost another two million to the US as well as significant numbers to Latin America, Canada and Eastern Europe. However, after World War II immigration began to outweigh emigration, as around 14 million ethnic Germans were expelled from the former eastern provinces of the Reich and other areas in Eastern Europe. Of these, roughly 12 million made their way to present-day Germany and several hundred thousand settled in Austria and other countries, while several hundred thousand died. Some additional 4.5 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe repatriated after 1950, especially around the end of the Eastern Bloc and mostly from the former Soviet Union, Poland and Romania.

Hans Joachim Morgenthau (February 17, 1904 – July 19, 1980) was a German-American jurist and political scientist who was one of the major 20th-century figures in the study of international relations. Morgenthau's works belong to the tradition of realism in international relations theory; he is usually considered among the most influential realists of the post-World War II period. Morgenthau made landmark contributions to international relations theory and the study of international law. His Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, went through five editions during his lifetime and was widely adopted as a textbook in U.S. universities. While Morgenthau emphasized the centrality of power and "the national interest," the subtitle of Politics Among Nations—"the struggle for power and peace"—indicates his concern not only with the struggle for power but also with the ways in which it is limited by ethical and legal norms.

In addition to his books, Morgenthau wrote widely about international politics and U.S. foreign policy for general-circulation publications such as The New Leader, Commentary, Worldview, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. He knew and corresponded with many of the leading intellectuals and writers of his era, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, George F. Kennan, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. At one point in the early Cold War, Morgenthau was a consultant to the U.S. Department of State when Kennan headed its Policy Planning Staff, as well as a second time during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations until he was dismissed by Johnson when he began to publicly criticize American policy in Vietnam. For most of his career, however, Morgenthau was esteemed as an academic interpreter of U.S. foreign policy.

Cincinnati, colloquially nicknamed Cincy, is the largest city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line with Kentucky. The third-most populous city in Ohio with a population of 309,317 at the 2020 census, Cincinnati serves as the economic and cultural hub of the tri-state Cincinnati metropolitan area, Ohio's most populous metropolitan area and the nation's 30th-largest at over 2.3 million residents.

Throughout much of the 19th century, Cincinnati was among the top 10 U.S. cities by population. The city developed as a river town for cargo shipping by steamboats, located at the crossroads of the Northern and Southern United States, with fewer immigrants and less influence from Europe than East Coast cities in the same period. However, it received a significant number of German-speaking immigrants, who founded many of the city's cultural institutions. It later developed an industrialized economy in manufacturing. Many structures in the urban core have remained intact for 200 years; in the late 1800s, Cincinnati was commonly referred to as the "Paris of America" due mainly to ambitious architectural projects such as the Music Hall, Cincinnatian Hotel, and the Roebling Bridge.

American cuisine consists of the cooking style and range of dishes prepared in the United States, an especially diverse culture in a large country with a long history of immigration. It principally derives from a mixing of European cuisine, Native American and Alaskan cuisine, and African American cuisine, known as soul food. The Northeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, South, West, Southwest, and insular areas all have distinctive elements, reflecting local food resources, local demographics, and local innovation. These developments have also given some states and cities distinctive elements. Hawaiian cuisine also reflects substantial influence from East Asian cuisine and its native Polynesian cuisine. Proximity and territorial expansion has also generated substantial influence from Latin American cuisine, including new forms like Tex-Mex and New Mexican cuisine. Modern mass media and global immigration have brought influences from many other cultures, and some elements of American food culture have become global exports. Local ethnic and religious traditions include Cajun, Louisiana Creole, Pennsylvania Dutch, Mormon, Minnesotan, Tlingit, Chinese American, German American, Italian American, Greek American, Jewish American, and Mexican American cuisines.

American cooking dates back to the traditions of the Native Americans, whose diet included a mix of farmed and hunted food, and varied widely across the continent. The Colonial period created a mix of new world and Old World cookery, and brought with it new crops and livestock. During the early 19th century, cooking was based mostly on what the agrarian population could grow, hunt, or raise on their land. With an increasing influx of immigrants, and a move to city life, American food further diversified in the later part of the 19th century. The 20th century saw a revolution in cooking as new technologies, the World Wars, a scientific understanding of food, and continued immigration combined to create a wide range of new foods. This has allowed for the current rich diversity in food dishes throughout the country. The popularity of the automobile in the 20th century also influenced American eating habits in the form of drive-in and drive-through restaurants.

In this context, the term "the hyphen" was a metonymical reference to this kind of ethnicity descriptor, and "dropping the hyphen" referred to full integration into the American identity. Some contemporary critics of this concept, such as Randolph Bourne in his criticism of the Preparedness Movement, accused America's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of hypocrisy by showing the same divided loyalty in pushing for the "Special Relationship" that they refused to tolerate in others. Other contemporaries, like Bishop John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti, argued eloquently that there is no contradiction between American patriotism and loyalty to one's ancestral culture, religion, and heritage language. In a 1916 letter to the Minneapolis Journal, one Minnesota German-American suggested that his own people would willingly "abandon the hyphen", but only if "Anglo-Americans" did so first.