European History Commons^™

Defending The Humanities: Making A Case For Eighteenth-Century Studies, Katherine Gustafson, Heather King, Scott R. St. Louis, Linda Zionkowski

Peer Reviewed Articles

While the percentage of humanities majors has long been on the decline, the more recent experiences of the Great Recession, its aftermath, and the outbreak of Covid-19 have introduced a variety of daunting and intertwined challenges to scholars in these disciplines. Financial and occupational anxieties surrounding higher education threaten not only to crowd out humanities departments but also to alter the very understanding of what higher education is. While some students attend college to prepare themselves for engaged citizenship or to learn in a community, many also attend as a pathway to employment and expect a prompt return on investment. …

Danish Cedar Falls, Carrie Eilderts

The Bridge

In 1855, Frederick Petersen’s family became the first Danish immigrants on record to settle in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The Petersens came from the Schleswig area on the Danish/German border, and in 1860, Christian Petersen came to Cedar Falls, also from Schleswig. More Danish families moved to Cedar Falls from Pine River, Wisconsin in 1866, and the next year Danes began arriving directly from their homeland after enduring a long journey by ship and train. By the early 1870s, Danes were settling in Cedar Falls in large numbers. By 1871, three hundred Danes called the city home, making up about ten …

Danish Settler-Colonial Communities In Australia And New Zealand, Julie K. Allen

The Bridge

The vast majority of Danish emigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, around four hundred thousand people between 1850 and 1950, settled in the United States, from whom more than 1.3 million Americans claim descent. Significant numbers of Danes also went to other countries, however, including about 15,000 Danes who settled in Argentina; 3,500 Danes who immigrated to New Zealand, reaching their peak at one percent of the New Zealand population in 1878; and around 50,000 Danes who immigrated to Australia,1 a significant percentage of which later re-immigrated to Denmark; in 1988, approximately 165,000 people, or one percent of Australia’s …

Front Cover

The Bridge

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Table Of Contents

The Bridge

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The Last Prisoners Of War: How Nazi-Looted Art Is Displayed In U.S. Museums, Monica May Thompson

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

How art museums approach NLA is important today because much of the public relies on museums for their education. NLA cases are especially controversial because they are not only legal battles, but ethical ones so museums have to be extra careful approaching them. Even if the museum has won the legal battle the public may not see them as winning the ethical one therefore they might want to avoid displaying this information to the public. However, as we can see with the previous websites, it actually looks worse for museums not to be open and honest about their NLA pieces …

Lives Well-Lived: My Danish American Ancestors In Shelby And Audubon Counties, Iowa, Cindy Larsen

The Bridge

My childhood was filled with my parents’ voices describing their love of history and knowledge of their Danish heritage in conversations that linger in my memory. My mother, Elizabeth Aagaard Larsen, and dad, Chester B. Larsen, were both children of Danish immigrants to the communities of Elk Horn and Kimballton, Iowa.

From Bornholm To Jamestown: C. C. Beck And The Settlement Of Danish Immigrants In Chautauqua County, New York And Warren County, Pennsylvania, John Everett Jones

The Bridge

One of the earliest Danish immigrant settlements in North America was a community in western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania called Jamestown. Marcus P. Jacobsen has been recognized as the first person from Bornholm to settle in the Jamestown area1 in 1855 or 1856, and early on, members of this community came almost exclusively from Bornholm. However, histories have not recognized the importance of Charles C. Beck in the origin of this community. Emigration from Bornholm has been written about by Henning Bender2 this article adds to that research by situating Beck within the larger community of Danish immigrants who …

Nordlyset And The New York City Danish Community, 1891-1953, Catrine Kyster Giery

The Bridge

The Danish community in New York City was never more than a speck on the Big Apple. At the same time, however, New York City and the surrounding area was for decades—and still is—home to a larger number of Danish-born people than most other places in the United States. Unfortunately, New York City’s popularity among Danes has not translated into a large amount of historical research about the city’s Danish community.

Nazi Zombies! The Undead In Wartime And The Iconography Of Mass Persuasion, Megan Faragher

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

William Seabrook’s depictions of Haitian zombies in his 1929 book, The Magic Island, sparked a cultural craze for the undead; even Zora Neale Hurston admitted that Seabrook’s dramatic description of zombies and masters ‘fired’ her imagination (Hurston 2018 [1938]: 134). The film industry was primed to profit from this first-wave zombie fad by producing a spate of interwar zombie films throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. These included the genre-establishing White Zombie (1932) and the subsequent Revolt of the Zombies (1936). However, whereas the racialization of early zombies and the films’ American southern settings bespoke a cultural anxiety over the …

The Trajectory Of Male Homosexuality In Nazism, Goral Bhatt

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Nazism redefined gender and sexual politics for society during the twentieth century, which determined the trajectory of male homosexuality under the Third Reich. While the party did not actively promote homosexuality, early Nazism valued hypermasculinity and homosocial relationships. Right-wing veterans of the First World War were attracted to the Nazi paramilitary unit, Sturmabteilung (SA), led by Ernst Röhm, a well-known gay man. The SA leaders promoted close male bonds among the members, which led to homoerotic relationships. If homoerotism was permitted within the early Nazi Party, why was there a steady decline in the treatment of gay men under the …

Anti-Semitism In France: How The Post-Holocaust Era Informs French Attitudes Today, Alyssa Chesek

Student Research Poster Presentations 2021

Following the end of the Holocaust, approximately 160,000 native Jews and 20,000 displaced Jews arrived in France. France, which operated under the Vichy government during World War II, was a Nazi puppet regime complicit in the persecution of its Jewish population. When Vichy fell in 1944, the recently instated Provisional Government of the French Republic became responsible for Jewish restitution and reintegration services. However, the new government refused to recognize a Jewish problem; this denial resulted in inadequate services and protections for the Jewish population. Without providing Jews with proper legal protections, the French government created an environment which may …

Women In British Window Display During The 1920s And 1930s, Kerry Meakin

Academic Articles

This paper examines the role of women in window display in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Window display in 1920s Britain was very much men’s work. Even when women were encouraged by those outside the profession, they were not necessarily encouraged by those within it. In 1923 the daily press and women’s journals devoted space to the debate on window dressing as an ideal and suitable profession for women. However, the editorial of Display, the official organ of the British Association of Display Men, disagreed. Display believed that women were unsuccessful at window dressing, justified by claiming they …

The Compromise Of Return: Viennese Jews After The Holocaust, By Elizabeth Anthony., Matthew P. Berg

2021 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Review Of Elizabeth Clarke And Robert W. Daniel, Eds., People And Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities In Early Modern England, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

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A Civil Society: The Public Space Of Freemason Women In France, 1744–1944, James Smith Allen

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women as full participants in the masonic brotherhood that shared in the rise of France’s civil society and its “civic morality” on behalf of women’s rights. As a vital component of the third sector during France’s modernization, freemasonry empowered women in complex social networks, contributing to a more liberal republic, a more open society, and a more engaged public culture.

James Smith Allen shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society, including the promotion of …

All-Union Council Of Evangelical Christians And Baptists As A Product Of Work Of Soviet Special Services, Oleksandr Korotaiev

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The purpose of the study is to show the work of the Soviet special services in the 1940s among the evangelical denominations of the Ukrainian SSR, which consisted of the formation of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists (hereinafter ACECB). The study of the work of the Soviet special services among the Protestant denominations of Ukraine during WWII and in the post-war period is generally a poorly studied topic of modern historical science. The article attempts to fill this gap by highlighting the work of the NKVD-MGB bodies among Evangelical Christians and Baptists, which aimed to create a …

Donde Las Nubes Se Unen Al Mar = Where The Clouds Meet The Water, Kimberly E. Contag

MSU Authors Collection

Donde las nubes se unen al mar (2021) es la traducción de la narrativa histórica Where the Clouds Meet the Water (2004), un libro que explica la saga de Ernesto Contag Ziehe y su familia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Ernesto y su familia fueron deportados de su patria ecuatoriana a la Alemania de los Nazis en 1942. La narrativa histórica que se lee casi como novela se basa en la investigación en bibliotecas, hemerotecas y archivos en tres continentes y en los documentos originales de los sobrevivientes de este canje político internacional de inocentes.

Donde las nubes se unen …

From The Dark Margins To The Spotlight: The Evolution Of Gastronomy And Food Studies In Ireland, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

For many years, food was seen as too quotidian and belonging to the domestic sphere, and therefore to women, which excluded it from any serious study or consideration in academia. This chapter tracks the evolution of gastronomy and food studies in Ireland. It charts the development of gastronomy as a cultural field, originally in France, to its emergence as an academic discipline with a particular Irish inflection. It details the progress that food history and culinary education have made in Ireland, suggesting that a new liberal / vocational model of culinary education, which commenced in 1999, has helped transform the …

The Fall Of Sir Thomas Wolsey: The Contingent Circumstances And Events That Led To His Demise, Jeremy M. Rodriguez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis attempts to describe the contingent events that led to the downfall of Lord High Chancellor Thomas Wolsey in England. Using the British History Online website and Hall's Chronicles, I read all the letters and papers under Henry VIII between the years of 1527 and 1529. While the popular belief is that it was from Wolsey's incapability to get the annulment Henry VIII wanted from his first wife, there are other arguments that attempt to steer away from that popular viewpoint. While I do follow the popular belief, in my research I found that the common belief of the …