German Element in St. Louis

As a result of the nineteenth-century German emigration to the United States, St. Louis, Missouri, along with Milwaukee and Cincinnati, would become constituted as the great "German triangle" of the Midwest. In 1893, Ernst Kargau, a reporter and editor for various German-American newspapers, published a German language commemorative history of St. Louis' German population entitled St. Louis in Former Years. Kargau's urban memoir constitutes one of the best snapshots we have of culture and society in a German-American community on the eve of World War I.