The transatlantic world of higher education : Americans at German universities, 1776-1914

Between the 1760s and 1914, thousands of young Americans crossed the Atlantic to enroll in German-speaking universities, but what was it like to be an American in, for instance, Halle, Heidelberg, Gottingen, or Leipzig? In this book, the author combines a statistical approach with a biographical approach in order to reconstruct the history of these educational pilgrimages and to illustratethe interconnectedness of student migration with educational reforms on both sides of the Atlantic. No matter who they were and where they were from, American students in Germany set up organizational structures, including an American church, to engage in academic networking, such as assisting one another in finding accommodations abroad or securing jobs in American academia after their return home. This detailed account of academic networking in European educational centers highlights the fruitfulness of travel in order to gain a clearer understanding of how to advance one's culture.