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Article: Germany, Relations with
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH
GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH.
The most important early contacts between Germany and the United States involved immigration. Members of various Protestant groups from Central Europe settled in colonial America for the first time in 1683 in Germantown, out-side Philadelphia. In the nineteenth century political un-rest, economic problems, population pressure, and famine joined religious persecution in prompting two phases of large-scale migration, first from the 1830s to the early 1850s and then from the late 1860s to the mid-1880s. Approximately 5 million Germans arrived in the United States through 1900. Nativist sentiment in the 1840s and 1850s encouraged community ...