Babel of the Atlantic

Bethany Wiggin is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.

• ContentsList of illustrations AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Multilingual Soundings in the Colonial Mid-Atlantic; “Differences of Manners, Languages and Extraction. Was Now No More”? Bethany WigginPART 1 NEW WORLD, NEW RELIGIONS1 . “Wie ein Nimrod / Like a Nimrod”: Babel, Confusion, and Coercive Bilingualism in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic Patrick M. Erben2 . The Moravian Threat to the Old World Establishment Craig Atwood3 . Women, Migration, and Moravian Mission: Negotiating Pennsylvania’s Colonial Landscapes Katherine FaullPART 2 THE LANGUAGES OF EDUCATION AND ESTABLISHED RELIGIONS4 . Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia Academy, Halle, and Göttingen Jürgen Overhoff5 . German or English? Halle’s Pastors in Pennsylvania and the Search for the Right Language, 1742–1820 Wolfgang FlügelPART 3 THE LANGUAGES OF RACE AND (ANTI-)SLAVERY6 . Writing Against Slavery: Germantown, Quakers, and the Ethnic Origins of Early Antislavery Thought Katharine Gerbner7 . “Ein schrecklicher Zustand”: Race, Slavery, and Gradual Emancipation in Pennsylvania Birte Pfleger8 . How the Quakers Worked with Moravians, Germans, the French, the British, and Enslaved and Free Africans: All in the Antislavery Cause Maurice JacksonPART 4 THE LANGUAGES OF WOOD AND STONE9 . Communicating Through Wood and Stone: Building a New World Identity in Pennsylvania Cynthia G. Falk10 . Germans in Colonial Philadelphia: Ethnicity, Hybridity,and the Material World Lisa MinardiList of ContributorsIndex

“The volume is successful in exposing the hidden and often underappreciated role that multilingualism played in colonial Philadelphia and its surrounds. Interpreting complex transatlantic networks and cultural change through the lens of multilingual and multicultural societies forces scholars from different disciplines and traditions to collaborate to achieve a more comprehensive, panoramic assessment of these developments. These concerted efforts reveal the complex, sometimes contradictory part that certain key figures such as Benjamin Franklin played in the establishment of societal and linguistic norms.”—Michael T. Putnam H-Transnational German Studies