Title:
Baltimore’s English-German schools 1836-1917
Author:
Scott A. Cooper
Thesis Advisor:
Evelyn Spratt
Committee Member:
Jens Mueller
Committee Member:
Maureen O'Neill
Degree Granting Institution:
Notre Dame of Maryland University--School of Education
Place:
Baltimore (Md.)
Publisher:
Notre Dame of Maryland University
Date Created:
2026
Type of Resource:
text
Genre:
thesis
Language:
eng
Format:
application/pdf
Physical Form:
electronic
Digital Source:
born digital
Abstract:
The German American community has been present in Baltimore since the city's founding in 1729, and its first Protestant settlers established congregations and parish schools during the city’s colonial-era history. The new United States granted freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly to its citizens, and German Catholics used the newly legal status of their Church to organize their first parish in the city in 1800. Subsequent waves of immigrants similarly took advantage of their constitutional rights to form the kinds of churches and institutions that had been denied them in Europe, leading to a proliferation of new Protestant denominations that founded churches and schools in neighborhoods throughout the city. The 1836 decision of the Rev. Heinrich Scheib to convert the monolingual school at Zion Lutheran Church to a nonsectarian bilingual English-German school created a model for the many Protestant and Catholic bilingual parochial schools founded over the next four decades. These schools educated both German- and English-speaking children in both languages and preserved the religious culture and practices of their parents’ homelands. Their strength and that of the private venture schools that sprang up beside them delayed the city’s public school system from opening its first bilingual school until 1874. These free schools led to the closure of many Protestant parochial schools, and ongoing linguistic assimilation caused the abandonment of bilingual curricula in other parochial and public schools in the World War I era. This study examined church and public school records and the Baltimore English- and German-language press to trace the development of a German American consciousness that promoted European pedagogical philosophies and the preservation of German intellectual culture in its bilingual schools.
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Level:
Doctoral
Discipline:
Educational Leadership for Changing Populations
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Identifier:
CooperSA-26
