It is a truism that much of what has been written about the history of colonial America has had a decidedly Anglocentric bias, focusing mainly on the experiences of English speakers or, at a minimum, analyzing early American history from the perspective of people who spoke mainly or exclusively English. Part of this bias is due to the practical challenge confronting scholars with an interest in American history of any period who lack proficiency in languages other than English to be able to access crucial primary documents. This challenge is heightened when the varieties of languages, such as German, that were employed in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed in substantial ways from their distant cousins written and spoken today.

Edited by Bethany Wiggin, Babel of the Atlantic complements scholarship on early American history by aiming to help “move colonial American historiography beyond the confounding frame of an English-speaking American nation” (3). The essays in this collection, most of which emerged from a 2012 conference sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, center on the experiences of multilingual communities in colonial Pennsylvania, mainly Philadelphia and its hinterlands. Not surprisingly, German speakers, as members of the largest non-English-speaking cultural group in early Pennsylvania, figure in each of the essays, in many of them centrally.

In her insightful and elegantly written introduction (1–37), Wiggin makes the crucial point that linguistic minority groups in places like colonial Pennsylvania did not inhabit monolingual islands cut off from speakers of English and other languages. On the contrary, she underscores that “[e]veryday life in the colonial mid-Atlantic necessitated functional multilingualism, as well as other forms of interlingual communication such as patois and pidgins, and nonverbal modes of communication” (4). This last point about nonverbal modes of communication is especially important to stress, as the collection does not focus on questions of language, as the title might suggest. Terms such as language and translation are used in nontechnical, figurative senses throughout the volume. While there is substance here for scholars interested in the social context of historical multilingualism in America, most of the essays address topics related to cultural products, philosophical and material, that emerged from communities that used more than one language. Accordingly, Babel of the Atlantic addresses social and cultural more than linguistic hybridity

The book is organized into four sections. The first, “New World, New Religions,” contains three chapters. Patrick M. Erben's essay, “‘Wie ein Nimrod/Like a Nimrod’: Babel, Confusion, and Coercive Bilingualism in the Eighteenth Century” (41–74), centers on a lively controversy in the colonial Philadelphia press advanced by critics of Christoph Saur, the most prominent German-language printer and advocate for the maintenance of German. These critics included Benjamin Franklin and others, who, fearing the disunity and disloyalty to the British crown that would supposedly ensue from multilingualism, compared Saur to King Nimrod, the ancient ruler associated with the construction of the Tower of Babel. Erben's chapter is followed by two essays that center on Moravian communities, “The Moravian Threat to the Old World Establishment” by Craig Atwood (75–100) and Katherine Faull's “Women, Migration, and Moravian Mission: Negotiating Pennsylvania's Colonial Landscapes” (101–27). Atwood's essay provides readers with an excellent overview of Moravian faith and life in both Europe and America, including an analysis of why they fell afoul of established religious and political orders. In her chapter, Faull focuses on the place of women in Moravian mission work, which was decidedly translingual and transcultural, drawing on fascinating ego-documents, including unpublished diaries, that paint a vivid picture of the multifaceted character of Moravians in the diverse mix of early Pennsylvanian society.

The second section, “The Languages of Education and Established Religions,” has two chapters. In the first, “Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia Academy, Halle, and Göttingen” (131–46), Jürgen Overhoff analyzes the history of the Philadelphia Academy, a forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin played a major role in its development, visiting German and other European institutions of higher learning in search of models. The second chapter in this section, Wolfgang Flügel's “German or English? Halle's Pastors in Pennsylvania and the Search for the Right Language, 1742–1820” (147–72) is the only essay in this collection that deals explicitly with language history. Drawing on numerous primary German-language sources that are not widely familiar to scholars, Flügel deftly characterizes the tensions among ethnic German immigrants to Pennsylvania and their descendants related to the maintenance of German and the shift to English monolingualism, a trend that brought with it concerns among those skeptical of Americanization about German Pennsylvanians’ spiritual and cultural health.

Part three, “The Languages of Race and (Anti-)Slavery,” has three chapters. In the first, “Writing against Slavery: Germantown, Quakers, and the Ethnic Origins of Early Antislavery Thought” (175–98), Katharine Gerbner discusses the evolution of English and Welsh Quaker opposition to slavery influenced by their contacts with ethnic German and Dutch coreligionists in Germantown. This chapter is nicely complemented by the following essays by Birte Pfleger and Maurice Jackson. In “‘Ein schrecklicher Zustand’: Race, Slavery, and Gradual Emancipation in Pennsylvania” (199–227), Pfleger traces the history of German Pennsylvanians’ views on slavery over the course of the eighteenth century, with an emphasis on German Lutherans and Reformed, who comprised the majority of ethnic Germans in Pennsylvania. Pfleger's analysis of the pro-slavery views held by many German Pennsylvanians offers an important corrective to the popular view that German Americans were always overwhelmingly opposed to slavery. In his chapter, “How the Quakers Worked with Moravians, Germans, the French, the British, and Enslaved and Free Africans: All in the Antislavery Cause” (228–46), Jackson brings the focus of this section back to Quakers and specifically the figure of Anthony Benezet (1713–1784), a French-born Philadelphian and convert to Quakerism who founded America's first abolition society.

Babel in the Atlantic wraps up with part four, “The Languages of Wood and Stone,” which has two chapters. Cynthia G. Falk, in “Communicating Through Wood and Stone: Building a New World Identity in Pennsylvania” (249–74), examines patterns of German Pennsylvanian vernacular architecture, focusing mainly on personal homes and showing how Old World styles were adapted through contacts with non-German cultural groups. The theme of cross-cultural influence is continued in Lisa Minardi's “Germans in Colonial Pennsylvania: Ethnicity, Hybridity, and the Material World” (275–98), which includes a fascinating analysis of German Pennsylvanian furniture and other artifacts, as well as the two most well-known Philadelphia churches serving German congregations, St. Michael's and Zion.

The connections across the diverse contributions in this skillfully edited volume are facilitated by a thorough index at the end. The endnotes for each chapter appear with their respective chapters. The book's aesthetic appeal is enhanced by the inclusion of over forty high-quality black-and-white images. It is to be recommended to anyone with an interest in the multicultural history of early America, especially those wanting to learn more about the diversity of German Pennsylvania.