Turner Collections

The Turner Collections at the University of Kansas' Max Kade Center for German-American Studies contain records from the Turnvereine [gymnastics clubs] of Lawrence (Kan.), New York City, and Milwaukee. An extensive collection of ledgers recording the membership and meeting history of the New York Turn Verein was donated to the Max Kade Center in 2008; this collection has been digitized and is now accessible to researchers and other interested parties via the Max Kade Center's online catalog. The Max Kade Center plans to expand this catalog in the future by incorporating its holdings related to the Lawrence Turnverein as well as the Milwaukee Turnverein's lending library, the contents of which are now housed at the Center.

• New York Turn Verein Ledgers
• Milwaukee Turnverein Lending Library
• Lawrence, Kansas Turnverein Ledgers

Turnerism was a popular movement which linked gymnastics, political education, civic life, and German identity and heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following the failed German unification of 1848, many politically dissident Germans immigrated to the United States. Influenced by 'Turnvater' Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's ideas about physical training and nationalism, these German immigrants founded Turnvereine - or clubs for practicing gymnastics and other sports as well as organizing socially - and constructed Turnhalle across the United States. The Turners were active supporters of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and their membership reached its peak in the late nineteenth century. The twentieth century's world wars led to a decline in Turnvereine membership as well as some distancing of the clubs from their German heritage, through, for example, the admission of non-German members and the use of English rather than German as the language of record. In the twenty-first century, Turnvereine continue to exist; fifty clubs across the United States are affiliated with the American Turners, whose national headquarters are in Louisville, Kentucky.

• Research
  • The American Turners: their past and present (Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte, 2015)
  • The American turner movement: a history from its beginnings to 2000 (Max Kade German-American Center [IUPUI], 2010)
  • Physical activity in the name of the Fatherland: Turnen and the National Movement (1810-1820) (Sporting Heritage, 1995)
  • Knights of Cause and Exercise: German Forty-Eighters and Turnvereine in the United States During the Antebellum Period (Canadian Journal of History of Sport, 1982)
• Journalism
  • Socialist Gym Rats Fought to End Slavery in America (Jacobin, 2023)
  • From Slavery Abolition to Public Education, German Radicals Made American History (Jacobin, 2023)

  • Walkabout: Turn, Turn, Turn Verein (Brownstoner, 2012)