COMMON BLOOD

About the Book

COMMON BLOOD sets the experiences of an extended family of post-Colonial English and German immigrants against the backdrop of more than eighty years of Charleston’s tumultuous nineteenth-century history. For the reader who appreciates that history does indeed repeat itself, and who finds social, cultural, and political history fascinating in its ability to provide a vision of both the past and the future, the family stories narrated here are eminently illustrative of the intersection of individual lives with the historical context of their times. The cultural heritage delineated in COMMON BLOOD interweaves European and American strands of [primarily] nineteenth-century history through an examination of an immigrant community that was as unique as its host city. Between Charleston’s colonial past and its current vitality lies a century or more of development that often was not pretty, not healthy, not admirable, only infrequently forward-thinking. It was during that period from the early 1800s to the turn of the twentieth-century that an extended family of English and German immigrants evolved into Charlestonians of a slightly different character than those citizens who gained fame of one sort or another and whose names appear in the history books as Charleston notables. These were the European settlers

About the Author

Robert Alston Jones draws a detailed account of his English and German forebears in Charleston from the early years of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. The intersection of their experiences as immigrants in the South’s unique Low country city with major political and cultural events occurring at the local, state, and national levels effected the acculturation and transformation of these European settlers into representative Charlestonians by the end of the century. Who were these individuals in search of new beginnings? How did their heritage affect their life in the South’s most historic city? What did they leave behind in the common blood of the city’s ethnic past? Jones’s account reveals the course of these families’ interconnected personal lives during more than eighty years of tumultuous times in Charleston. Robert Alston Jones, a Charleston native, is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he served as faculty member and administrator for thirty-six years. His degrees in German Language and Literature from Duke University and the University of Texas-Austin heightened his appreciation of his German and English immigrant heritage in Charleston and facilitated his research into the European origins of his extended immigrant family. Here he portrays their experiences against the backdrop of the city’s unique political, cultural and social foundations. A resident of Milwaukee since 1966, Jones still considers himself a Charlestonian at heart.