Back in print again, this is the story of the "Forty-Eighters," political refugees who fled German-speaking countries in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848. Among their numbers were Carl Schurz, later to become a U.S. senator and advisor to presidents Lincoln and Hayes, and his wife Margarethe Schurz, who founded the kindergarten movement in the United States.
Many Forty-Eighters settled in and enormously influenced the growth of Watertown, Wisconsin, which was at one time the second largest city in the state. By consulting source materials in English and German, Charles...