To: SunkenCiv
G. W. Featherstonhaugh, an English geologist who did a lot of pioneering work on the geology of the United States, reports in his Excursion through the Slave States (the book was published in 1844 but the trip was about 10 years earlier), that when traveling through the Shenandoah Valley he was told that many of the German-American residents of that area did not believe in the Copernican theory.
To: Verginius Rufus
Martin Luther denied the Copernican theory and Galileo's observational verification. Luther wasn't however the one who put Galileo under house arrest, which is where he was when he died. Anyway, the German immigrant waves to the US have been a wide variety of different sects; my own are the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch), but in one of the small towns near my hometown -- nearly all German or assimilated German surnames -- it's Lutheran & Catholic, with a Reformed church right in the village that operates in fact as a non-denominational place of worship (that's probably a little rare among the Reformed ;'). The Lutheran cemetery has German-language grave monuments in the oldest section. During the kulturkampf Roman Catholic Germans from certain niches in the newly unified German Empire left almost en masse by village, and some of those place names ended up as villages and (now) towns here in Michigan, and probably quite a number of other places in the US.
17 posted on
09/05/2011 4:32:02 AM PDT by
SunkenCiv
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