Sunday 6 October 2019

deustch-amerikanischer tag

Observed under the auspices of Public Law 100-104, 101 Statute §721 and proclaimed by Ronald Reagan on the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing back in 1983, German-American Day marks the 1683 arrival (see also) of thirteen families from Krefeld near Dรผsseldorf and Duisberg in Philadelphia, founding the settlement of what would eventually become Germantown, Pennsylvania.
The occasion was commemorated from the seventeenth century onwards and held in other parts of the colonies and country with German diaspora but was discontinued during World War I. This first group of Mennonite families had fled Prussia for religious freedom and established the Pennsylvania Dutch identity and were among the first, along with the Quakers, to petition for the abolition of slavery in 1688. Though coinciding with Oktoberfest, the largest celebration of German culture abroad, German-American Day predates the first Wiesn of 1810 by several decades.