Join us for a local-history presentation and Q&A with author Roberta Reb Allen.

Allen's latest books are The Life and Death of Barrett, Kansas, and Once We Were Strangers: A German Immigrant Family in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest. Based on Allen's research, including hundreds of family letters and documents translated from Old German, these books uncover untold stories of the German-American experience in the Kansas of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is a hybrid program: Attend in person at the library, 223 E. 7th, Newton, KS, or click here to sign up for the Zoom Webinar broadcast. Allen will join us remotely via Zoom.

About Once We Were Strangers:

Little attention has been paid to the settlement of Germans in Kansas, and Roberta Reb Allen’s Once We Were Strangers helps to fill that void. It is both the saga of an immigrant family told within the larger social, political, and economic context of the day and a scholarly exploration of the settlement patterns and the diverse choices made by German pioneers. Starting in the small village of Ebhausen in the Black Forest of the Kingdom of Württemberg in what is now Germany, Allen follows the fortunes of the Lodholzes who journeyed across the Atlantic and eventually settled on the plains of the Kansas Territory in Marshall County.

Based on nearly 200 family letters and documents translated from Old German, Once We Were Strangers chronicles, through the pens of ordinary people, the conditions in Württemberg which led to emigration and the sweep of American history from the 1850s to the nominal end of the frontier in 1890. In addition, Once We Were Strangers provides the unusual opportunity to follow a German immigrant family for an extended period, almost from cradle to grave. Using remarkably rare documentary evidence, Allen explores the largely untold story of German assimilation, uncovering the pressures the Lodholzes faced and how they responded to the antebellum Midwest.

This family’s story is full of hardship, endurance, joys, and sorrows, and is interwoven with the history of westward expansion, German migration, and Kansas, with a particular emphasis on German settlement patterns prior to the Civil War.

About The Life and Death of Barrett, Kansas:

The Life and Death of Barrett, Kansas is the real life story of a small, stouthearted town and an immigrant farming family who lived near it. Both had been among the first settlements and settlers of the Kansas Territory. Based on an abundance of family letters and photographs as well as in-depth research, Roberta Reb Allen has woven the story of the family, the town and the other inhabitants it served over seven decades—from the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, to the 1960s, when Barrett was razed to make room for a dam and many of the family members and other inhabitants had died. You will meet and hear the voices of a large cast of "characters" to draw you into a now long gone era of American history.

About Roberta Reb Allen:

Born in New York during World War II, like most writers Roberta Reb Allen has always been a voracious reader, encouraged by comfortable armchair reading out loud with her aunt. She spent her early teenage years in Beirut, Lebanon, where her father was a diplomat and where she developed an abiding passion for history fueled by excursions to the Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre and the great crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers. After receiving her M.A. in history from the University of Chicago, Allen spent most of her working career as a curriculum writer. In addition to Once We Were Strangers and The Life and Death of Barrett, Kansas, her earlier works include Examined Lives, which tells the story of her mother who was given a lobotomy, and Lavender Days which relates her and her husband's experiences as novices creating a flower farm from scratch.