Hermann Winde wrote his 1961 dissertation at the Martin Luther University at Halle-Wittenberg on the Lutherans who came to the British colony of Georgia in the eighteenth century. Russell C. Kleckley, Professor Emeritus at Augsburg University (MN), has translated and lightly edited Winde's dissertation to produce this volume. Winde's work covers the story of the Georgia Lutherans from before their arrival in 1734 through the end of the century with a few notes on developments in the early nineteenth century. Winde's work provides an extensive narrative of the various Lutheran communities, most notably the Salzburger community at Ebenezer, as well as an examination of their communal practices, the lives and theology of their pastors, and their relationships with other ecclesiastical groups in the colony, particularly the Moravians, Anglican Methodists, and Reformed groups. The volume also includes three appendices that provide legal, bibliographical, and archival information related to the Lutheran settlements in Georgia.

Sources for and histories of the Salzburger experience in Georgia have never been lacking. During the eighteenth century, Samuel Urlsperger edited and published versions of journals and letters from the Lutheran leaders in Georgia under the Anglicized title Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants, Who Settled in America (translated into English in the later twentieth century by George Fenwick Jones). In the mid-nineteenth century, P. A. Strobel wrote a history of their experiences, The Salzburgers and their Descendants, but as Winde pointed out, after Strobel “the church history of the Lutherans in Georgia advanced no farther” (6). Winde, however, advanced the narrative examination significantly, and Kleckley has brought those advancements to an English-speaking audience through this translation. Winde advanced the understanding of the Lutheran experience in Georgia in two main ways: by returning to original source material held in German archives and by expanding the examination out beyond the Salzburgers in Ebenezer to include other Lutheran settlements in eighteenth-century Georgia and even into South Carolina. During his research, Winde discovered that the original archival material on the Salzburgers included important information about their experiences that Urlsperger had omitted from the published Detailed Reports. Indeed, his examination revealed that “the journals were edited, and thoroughly so,” producing a published version that represented “an outright re-working of the material.” Urlsperger and the then-leader at Halle, Gotthilf August Francke, even corresponded about this process and agreed upon a set of guidelines for the editing (10). The result: secondary histories that relied on the published Detailed Reports described only the “surface layers” of the Salzburger story (11).

By using the archival information, Winde was able to paint a “fundamentally new” (13) and much more realistic picture of the Lutheran experience in Georgia—one that showed a much less uniformly rosy picture of their experience than the one Urlsperger had made public in the eighteenth century when he was trying to build support for the colony. Winde discovered a series of omissions from the Detailed Reports, most of which told stories of struggle or conflict. For instance, during the initial settlement, when Ebenezer had been granted land that proved to be impossible to farm productively, John Martin Boltzius, the leader of the expedition, wrote bluntly and even bitterly about their difficulties at Ebenezer and with the Georgia leadership, but, as Winde noted, “all of these things were carefully omitted” (38) in the published Detailed Reports. Urlsperger and other editors likewise omitted later manuscript reports of internal dissension within the community, sometimes in Winde's judgment prompting even the failure to publish several years’ worth of reports from the late 1750s to the early 1760s (see 58 and 158). By relying on the archival instead of the published sources related to the Lutherans, Winde was able to produce a much more extensive but also much more complex history of the Salzburgers in the eighteenth century. Winde revealed for Salzburger scholars what Wesley scholars learned when they pushed past John Wesley's eighteenth-century published journals to his manuscript journals and diaries—both of which contained a treasure of additional material that Wesley, at the time, did not wish to make publish: be wary of and critical towards contemporary published materials based on private materials and use original archival and manuscript sources whenever possible.

Had Winde's contributions stopped there, he would have made a valuable contribution to the fields of Salzburger and early Georgia studies, but his work stands not only at the end of an historiographical trail but at the beginning of one also, and Kleckley's translation opens up the field even more widely. Although written in 1961, the dissertation has been unavailable in any published form until this edition and never before in English at all. Nevertheless, scholars like George Fenwick Jones, who wrote two monographs on the Salzburgers and other Germans in early Georgia in the 1980s and 1990s, utilized it, and so Winde's work has indirectly made its way into English-language historiography. Kleckley's translation will undoubtedly increase Winde's importance even more as non-German reading scholars (such as myself) continue to study the rich history of early Georgia. Winde's work also has the historiographical advantage of fitting into two currently active fields in the early modern era: Atlantic History and Networking History. Winde's work contains direct and detailed information about many of the individuals involved in the Lutheran (and broader Georgia) settlements and allows scholars to make network connections between individuals that more general works would not.

Although written in a bit of a stilted style (as are most dissertations), the translation Kleckley has provided is easily readable by the general public and scholar alike. Being a dissertation, it contains copious citations useful to scholars, but Winde also provided clear sections within his work that make the examination easy to follow. Scholars of early Georgia will find this edition essential to their research, and all will find it a very human telling of an engaging Atlantic World story from the eighteenth century.