Revolutions demanding constitutional government and national rights spread through Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and other European cities in 1848. Their defeat sent activists, writers and intellectuals into exile in Britain, Switzerland and the United States. German-speaking refugees became widely known as the Forty-Eighters.

Poets including Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh turned revolution, censorship and exile into major subjects of political verse. Refugees also founded newspapers and cultural societies that carried European radical literature into American cities.