History Commons^™

The Greater Challenge: Staying Home Or Emigrating?, Inger Wiehl

The Bridge

This presentation poses the challenge of emigrating versus that of staying home, exemplified by a Southern Jutlander who stayed home during the years of Prussian rule between 1864 and 1920 and one who left for America during those years. It begs the larger question of who endures more, those who leave or those who stay behind, a salient issue underlying all emigration and any significant parting. Put in classical terms: Who faces the greater challenge Odysseus or Penelope? He endures any number of dangers on his way back from Troy; she stays by her loom and keeps home intact for …

Nineteenth-Century Emigration From Sollerod, A Rural Township In North Zealand (Sjaelland), Niels Peter Stilling

The Bridge

In 1985, Erik Helmer Pedersen wrote that "the history of Danish emigration to America can be seen, in very broad terms, as the story of how a small part of the population tore itself away from the national community in order to build a new existence in foreign lands. Those who write the history of the emigrants must, on the one hand, see them as a minority in relation to the Danish whole, and, on the other hand, must reconstruct that little part of the history of American immigration which concerns the Danes."

This article attempts to do just that …

Anton Kvist Danish-American Poet: His Life And His Works, Birgit Flemming Larsen

The Bridge

Anton Kvist was born in 1878 in a small village in the northern part of Jutland in Denmark. In his home at Valsted there was a large group of ten siblings, and already as a six year old boy Anton had to work as a shepherd boy at the same time as he started to go to school. His father was a bricklayer, and so were a few of his brothers. At the age of sixteen he followed the family tradition and became a bricklayer's apprentice. In 1898 he came to Copenhagen to work as a bricklayer. Here in 1900 …