The Lost World of Pennsylvania Pluralism: Immigrants, Regions, and the Early Origins of Pluralist Ideologies in America

RUSSELL A. KAZAL

IN DECEMBER 1903, a professor from Philadelphia traveled into that city's hinterland to give a talk on local history. Marion Dexter Learned had made a specialty of studying the Pennsylvania German dialect. Now he ventured out to a swath of rural Pennsylvania where many inhabitants—descendants of eighteenth-century German settlers—still spoke that dialect as their first language. There, in the small city of Lebanon, he urged members of a local historical society to help reconstruct the history of what today would be called Pennsylvania's ethnic diversity.