make for a useful addition to courses that focus on borderlands, transnationalism, the state, or social movements, not to mention U.S. or Mexican history. The Germans of New York’s Kleindeutschland Ziegler-McPherson, Christina. The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880–1930. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 238 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1978823198; $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978- 1978823181. Eric C. Cimino Molloy University, Rockville Centre, NY, USA doi:10.1017/S1537781422000482 Prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the largest loss of life in New York City occurred when the General Slocum steamboat burned in the East River on June 15, 1904. On board were over one-thousand, three-hundred passengers, mostly German Ameri- cans on their way to an annual church picnic. As the Slocum sailed up the river, a fire started below deck that caused pandemonium throughout the ship. Passengers, many of whom could not swim, frantically grabbed defective life vests and leapt overboard. Of the over one thousand people who died in the water, the majority were women and children from Kleindeutschland, a German neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It has long been thought that the tragedy was too much to bear for the German community, causing its inhabitants to abandon Kleindeutschland in an attempt to start their lives over elsewhere. Christina Ziegler-McPherson, in The Great Disappearing Act, seeks to excavate this now forgotten former German enclave. She traces Kleindeutsch- land’s mid- to late-nineteenth-century rise and charts its subsequent decline as Germans dispersed to other parts of the city and assimilated into Anglo-American culture in the early twentieth century. For Ziegler-McPherson, though, it is World War I that is to blame for the disappearance of Germans in New York, not the General Slocum disaster. In 1880, Kleindeutschland was a community of German immigrants and their descendants. Largely self-sufficient, its residents had little reason to travel outside the neighborhood to meet their basic needs. It contained thousands of German stores, thousands of social clubs, eight hundred beer gardens, over thirty churches and syna- gogues, and twenty German language periodicals. The social clubs, or vereine, were the foundation of German identity, with the singing societies (gesangvereine) providing pride of place. These mostly male groups routinely performed German folk songs and operas. The Liederkranz club was one of the largest, with fifteen-hundred members hailing from the community’s business and political class. Working-class Germans had their own gesangvereine, such as the socialist Karl Marx’s Singing Society. There were even forty 102 Book Reviews https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781422000482 Published online by Cambridge University Press