Paupers, Parties and Plagues

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David Koehler continues his history of German peasants with this brilliant second volume, the companion to Bakers, Brewers and Bricklayers (2022), which was nominated for a Midwest Book Award. Paupers, Parties and Plagues, written in a vivid non-academic style, shows how this hardy people survived waves of war, plague and famine yet managed to invent the first printing press, oil lamps, iron stoves, the pivoting front cart axle, cuckoo clocks and stagecoaches between 1450 and the mid-19th century. Koehler explains why the Industrial Revolution arrived late in German-speaking lands, and shows how the revolution of 1848, known as the "turning point when Germany did not turn", left Germans at a poverty equal to today's Sub-Saharan Africa. The religious upheaval of the Thirty Years' War played out mostly on German soil, leaving the German-speaking world destitute and divided, which eventually leads to a mass exodus, beginning in 1820, when millions escaped poverty and despotism for freedom and food in the Americas.