A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working-class support that might otherwise have gone to his Socialist enemies. He lost that battle as the Catholics responded by forming a powerful Centre party and using universal male suffrage to gain a bloc of seats. Bismarck then reversed himself, ended the Kulturkampf , broke with the Liberals, imposed protective tariffs, and formed a political alliance with the Centre Party to fight the Socialists.
Bismarck—a Junker himself—was strong-willed, outspoken, and sometimes judged overbearing, but he could also be polite, charming, and witty. Occasionally he displayed a violent temper, and he kept his power by melodramatically threatening resignation time and again, which cowed Wilhelm I.
He possessed not only a long-term national and international vision but also the short-term ability to juggle complex developments. Many historians praise him as a visionary who was instrumental in uniting Germany and, once that had been accomplished, kept the peace in Europe through adroit diplomacy. The Emperor of France, Napoleon III, tried to gain territory for France in Belgium and on the left bank of the Rhine as compensation for not joining the war against Prussia and was disappointed by the surprisingly quick outcome of the war.
The conflict was caused by Prussian ambitions to extend German unification and French fears of the shift in the European balance of power that would result if the Prussians succeeded. A suitable pretext for war arose in when the German Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was offered the Spanish throne, vacant since a revolution in France pressured Leopold into withdrawing his candidacy.
Not content with this, Paris demanded that Wilhelm, as head of the House of Hohenzollern, assure that no Hohenzollern would ever seek the Spanish crown again.
To provoke France into declaring war with Prussia, Bismarck published the Ems Dispatch, a carefully edited version of a conversation between King Wilhelm and the French ambassador to Prussia, Count Benedetti.
This conversation had been edited so that each nation felt its ambassador had been slighted and ridiculed, thus inflaming popular sentiment on both sides in favor of war.
Following the establishment of the German Empire on January 18, , the United States recognized the new German Empire by changing the accreditation of its Minister to Prussia to become Minister to the German Empire. On April 8, , U. President Ulysses S. Grant dated March 16, The letter from the President congratulated the Emperor on his assumption of the German throne and recognized him as the head-of-state of a federal Germany. On February 3, , U.
President Woodrow Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with Germany, that the U. Ambassador in Berlin James W. Gerrard had been withdrawn, and that the U. Following a series of attacks against American merchant ships on the high seas by German U-boats, on February, 24, , the U.
On April 2, U. The history of the establishment of recognitions and relations, where applicable between the United States and the German states impacted several different areas of policy, including:.
Trade and Commerce. Although the Napoleonic period stunted the growth of industrialization in the German states during the early nineteenth century, by the s and s the industrialization process was underway, especially in areas such as Westphalia, the Rhineland, and Upper Silesia. It was also during this time that the first railways were built in the German lands, thus facilitating the transportation of goods to and from the main ports of Hamburg and Bremen.
As a result, the German states and after , the German Empire and the United States both sought to cultivate trade and commercial ties for mutual benefit.
Emigration, Citizenship, and Naturalization. One point of contention between the U. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Oxford Reference. Publications Pages Publications Pages.
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Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. They were conquered and forcibly Christianised in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic Knights, diverted from the Holy Land.
German peasants were brought in to farm the land and by around the majority of the population was German, though the Poles annexed part of Prussia in the following century, leaving the Knights with East Prussia. Meanwhile Germans had conquered the Brandenburg area to the west and the margraves, or marcher lords, of Brandenburg became Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Both Brandenburg and East Prussia fell under control of the Hohenzollern family, which mastered the Brandenburg hereditary nobility, the Junkers, and began the long march to power in Europe which was to end with the First World War and the abdication of the Kaiser in
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