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The oldest american "citizens" are merely 250yo. Like the country. My point being, everyone in America is more or less an "immigrant" if you go back enough on
by tough 3mo ago
The oldest american "citizens" are merely 250yo. Like the country.
My point being, everyone in America is more or less an "immigrant" if you go back enough on their family tree, but the Native Americans.
- panick21_ 3mo agoGermany is a much newer country.
- raverbashing 3mo agoYes on paper but no In the end Prussia ate Germany
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoBut a much older culture.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoThere was no unified "German" culture before Germany, so it doesn't make sense to talk about a "German" culture. Is it the northern maritime German? The southern Bavarian German? The Rhinelanders? The Swabians? Swiss germans? Northern Italian germans? Austrian Germans? There was the German ethnicity, and a mosaic of Germanic languages.
- denismenace 3mo agoNonsense. Just because there was no stricly "unifed" (whatever that means) German culture does not mean that German culture does not exist. There is clearly a shared core of culture and ethnicity to all the listed peoples. But again you can continue with trying to make it seem as if everything is equal to everything else. I'll leave you with this little thought experiment. If we put a northen German, a Swiss German and a Spaniard in a room, how long will it take for the two germans to realize they have more in common with each other than the spaniard?
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> If we put a northen German, a Swiss German and a Spaniard in a room, how long will it take for the two germans to realize they have more in common with eath other than the spaniard? Switzerland is actually quite different from Germany.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoWhy would German culture start before unification, but American culture pops out of nothing at the founding of the nation?
- hollerith 3mo agoBecause they've been living where they're living now for about 1500 years, speaking the same language or more precisely speaking a group of closely-related languages, descended from the same small initial population.
- panick21_ 3mo agoUS culture also starts earlier but the reality is a majority of what makes up US culture only showed up in the region much later. As well as expansion into Spanish and other areas that were absorbed.
- panick21_ 3mo agoI actually disagree with you. If you look at the centuries before 1870 there clearly was a recognition of a common culture, this isn't really controversial. People often laugh about the Holy Roman Empire (mostly people who have not studied it) but it did actually serve as a distinct legal and cultural tradition for much the area that is now Germany (and more). The language are different but not that different, with some effort you could understand each other. Many Germans from different parts fought together in mercenary bands or for Holy Roman Empire armies. During the Revolution in the 1850 they tried to establish a unified Germany, so clearly the idea had wide recognition by then. You don't have movement like that spring up out of nowhere. After the Napoleonic war, German Confederation was a very recognized and understood fact. Sure if was not fully 'unified' but neither is French or Spanish culture. - Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History - Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoIn that case, the oldest German citizens are 155 years old. Like the country. And by that logic even many native Americans are immigrants. The Apache and Sioux people were living up in canada by the Great lakes near the time Spaniards were on the continent and then started migrating south westward. Not to even mention all of the natives who were forcibly moved out of their original places or fled due to war/famine/etc
- eldaisfish 3mo agono, that's not true. The nation of Germany might not have existed, but the ethnic groups who would later define Germany very much did.
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoYour argument is that a group of independent states spanning a huge part of a continent that banded together into a country in the 1800s forms a country that is also an ethnicity, but that a group of independent states spanning a huge part of a continent that banded together even longer ago is not a country that is also an ethnicity?
- stickfigure 3mo agoThe difference is that - excepting about 1.4% of the population - everyone here in the US is either an immigrant or descended from immigrants. Most of them long after the Mayflower sailed. However long it takes to create a new capital-E Ethnicity, it hasn't been long enough.
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoWho cares if most people in the US had ancestors that came from somewhere else? My English ancestors have precisely no bearing on the way I live my life any more than my German, Dutch or Polish (well, they came from what is now Poland, but would never have thought of themselves as polish). The child of immigrants in Germany is going to be far more German than I am despite my ancestry. American culture is undeniably real. American values and beliefs likewise. Is the only thing that decides an ethnicity how far back your ancestors have been procreating within a country’s current borders? Culture and values is a better delineator, and it is pretty undeniable that America has a distinct culture and value set.