Students were required to create a final presentation, along with a paper, on one aspect of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that intrigued them. These ranged from detailed explanations on why the levees failed, to interviews with survivors, to new evacuation plans for the Gulf Coast.

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The Gailey Family Papers discuss and depict a 333.5-acre tract of land called “Montroyal,” which lies along Blacklegs Creek in present-day Indiana County in western Pennsylvania. The collection includes various receipts, maps, deeds, property transfers, family trees, and journals that span four generations of Gaileys.

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The lively contemporary interest in the German-American Friedrich Hecker, as demonstrated by the surge in literature on him, as well as by the number of monuments to Hecker that have popped up throughout the Midwest, makes the availability of unpublished primary sources on Hecker especially important. One such source, the “Address to the German-American Population of the United States,” which appeared in the Belleviller Volksblatt in 1856, remains the only extant sustained piece of writing from this period of Hecker’s public life. Since the mid-1980s, clippings of the address have sat in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri ­ St. Louis. Because the clippings had not yet been digitized, they have had an extremely limited audience, especially given that they are written in elaborate, nineteenth-century German and appear in the old blackletter typeface, Fraktur, which was commonly used by German-language printing presses before the First World War. Facilitating the readership of primary sources related to Hecker considerably supplements available resources on the German contribution to the American Civil War, and it could provide the basic material for continued serious biographical study of a man who remains legendary in Germany today. It is with this motivation, in addition to my desire to improve my reading comprehension of German, to learn to read Fraktur fluently, and to learn more about German-Americans in a time when they comprised such a substantial portion of the United States population, that I began my study of Hecker’s “Address” in the Belleviller Volksblatt. Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have shown considerable interest in Hecker’s life and in particular his politics, and I hope that making available this rich text by an important figure in the immigrant history of nineteenth-century America will help raise the German consciousness of the American tangent of German history and augment American awareness of the contribution of European Liberalism to American political and social life. - Aaron Mertz

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