Wittenberg An American College

"Half of all the colleges founded before the Civil War did not survive. Wittenberg did. This is the story of a college on the Ohio frontier that sought to Americanize millions of German immigrants and to Americanize the German Lutheran Church. In spite of that, Wittenberg was caught in the anti-foreign prejudice of “Nativists” who feared the influence of immigrants on American institutions. The school prospered after the Civil War as America embraced German culture from classical music to the Christmas tree. The school again faced prejudice in the anti-German furor of World War I. Simultaneously, this is the story of students and faculty coping with the pressures of a nation going from the poverty of the rural frontier to the wealth of an urban-industrial society and how they and Wittenberg changed."