THURSDAY 20 June 2024 - Virtual Speaker

Location: Zoom, 7:00 PM ET / 6:00 PM CT / 5:00 PM MT / 4:00 PM Pacific Time

(Sponsored in partnership with California, Chicago, New York, Philip Lee Phillips, Rocky Mountain, and Texas Map Societies)

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtc-Gvqz4qH9Utjj84-aCvhg8gzWWEBioN

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Title: Mapping German Americans and Their Communities: Heinz Kloss and His 1974 Ethnographic Atlas

Speaker: Heiko Mühr, Map Metadata & Curatorial Specialist, Earth Sciences & Map Library, University of California Berkeley

Summary: Heinz Kloss’s Atlas of 19th and Early 20th Century German-American Settlements, published in Marburg, Germany, in a bilingual German-English edition, is an impressive achievement of data visualization. The massive atlas contains 108 leaves of plates, chiefly folded maps, and presents statistical information compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, various church bodies, and German American social organizations.

Kloss analyzed the distributions of key groups within the conservative church Germans and liberal club Germans’ milieus and thus documented the diversity of the German diaspora in the United States with thematic maps. This generated some interest among geographers; Karl Raitz, in “Ethnic Maps of North America” (1978), viewed the atlas “as a research tool for the study of linguistic assimilation.”