The book includes extensive List of Tables, List of Illustrations, Maps, as well as comprehensive Index and Bibliography.
Huey writes on pages 281-285: “The southeastern Dakota Territory became the first destination of the Bessarabian Germans to North America, because in the spring of 1873, a group of Germans from the Berezan District in Xerson Province of South Russia settled there and the positive news they sent back attracted other Germans living in Russia.”
“In three years (1870s), the first German emigrants from Bessarabia to North America. Began to arrive in Yankton by train from New York and settled lands just north and west of the Johannestal group in Bon Homme and Hutchinson County. The Bessarabian Germans came there because the wanted to settle near other Germans who shared their language, customs, background, and religion. News was clearly passed by letters. It is very likely that reports from the Johannestal group settling in the Dakota Territory reached Bessarabian Germans in Russia via church connections, possibly via rumors, or by copies or extracts of the letters that were passed among the churches in South Russia and Bessarabia”.
“One clear impact of the decrees of the early 1870s was that it was a force that caused people to start thinking about the possible advantages of life outside of Russia. Emigration out of Russia, not seriously thought about earlier, now became a possibility worth considering”.
The Table of Contents includes:
Introduction: Limited Sources Shape the Study of German Bessarabia
I. Surnames and Origins of the First German Settlers in Bessarabia
II. The Economic Situation of German Peasants in Eighteenth-Century Prussia, Württemberg, and the Upper Rhineland
III. The German Emigration to Bessarabia, 1814-47
IV. The Founding of the German Colonies in Bessarabia
V. The German Colonies in Bessarabia had to Overcome Many Difficulties to Establish Themselves on Firm Ground
VI. Settled and Communal Life in Mid-nineteenth-century German Bessarbia
VII. Demographic Data Reveal Conditions and Customs in German Bessarabia
Photo Gallery
VIII. The German Colonies Expand in Bessarabiaa and Russia Starts to View Them Differently: 1860-70
IX. The Decrees of 1871 and 1874 Significantly Changed the Legal Rights and Responsibilities of German Settlements in Russia
X. The German Emigration from Bessarabia 1875-1914: Pushes and Pulls
XI. German Bessarabia, 1870-1914: Economic Growth, Increasing Prosperity, Territorial Expansion
XII. German Bessarabia 1914-40: The Disaster of World War I and A Partial Recovery as a Province of Romania
XIII. The Resettlement
About the author:
Burkett W. Huey, Jr. was born in Bismarck, North Dakota. His parents, Burkett W. and Bertha Raugust Huey, both Dakota natives, were graduates of Jamestown College. Burkett was educated at Amherst College and the University of Chicago. He was a Fulbright Fellow in the UK (Oxford) and in the Soviet Union (Universities of Moscow and Leningrad). He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures and was an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Unhappy, though, with the influence of French Structuralism on the teaching of literature, he left teaching and spent the rest of his career in business. Burkett has managed pension assets and group insurance contracts for US and international businesses for RJR Nabisco, Citibank and for much of his career as a senior executive at PepsiCo.
