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Book Review: The Swiss American Historical Society 1927-1977, Leo Schelbert

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

This history of a small ethnic-national association is not the usual anniversary publication, listing glorious achievements and displaying pictures of smiling officers or of happy gatherings. It presents instead a concise anatomy of the ups and downs, even near collapses, the organization faced during its first five decades.

Swiss Mennonite Story: Study Tour Itinerary, Delbert Grätz, H. K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

Welcome aboard to a tour of a lifetime! This is not an ordinary package tour but one in which each phase has been worked out by myself with the aid of Byron Ediger, Manager of Menno Travel Service, 310 S. Main St., Goshen, Indiana. 46526.

Albert Staub: The Story Of A Wayward Swiss Immigrant, Paul Hockings, H. K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

December 18, 1977, happened to be the 120th anniversary of the first murder ever to have taken place in what was then the remote village of Blue Island, and is nowadays a large suburb at the south end of Chicago.

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Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Murray Luck Et. Al. , Eds., Modern Switzerland, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

Modern Switzerland announces itself as "a comprehensive cross-sectional view as portrayed in 26 chapters by an allSwiss panel of authors." The issue of the SAHS Newsletter that carries this review also contains a flyer with a table of contents giving the titles of the twenty-six chapters as well as the names and affiliations of the twenty-seven contributors.

Leo Schelbert And Hedwig Rappolt, Eds,: Alles Ist Ganz Anders Hier, Bruno Gujer

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

To emigrate to the United States today does not seem to be the great adventure anymore that it once was. The material inconveniences of the move are negligible, the problems of psychological adjustment trivial compared to the physical hardships and culture shocks endured by the immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

The University Of Texas At San Antonio Institute Of Texan Cultures, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

Peter Mansbendel was born in Basel in 1883 and came to the United States in his early twenties. In New York he met a well-to-do Texan beauty. They married and eventually settled in Austin, Texas. From 1915 to his death, in 1940, Mansbendel pursued his calling of woodcarver by doing pieces of furniture, fireplace mantels, portrait plaques and busts and other kinds of decorative works for individual patrons and institutions such as the University of Texas.

Swiss Mennonite Family Names: An Annotated Checklist, Leo Schelbert, Sandra Luebking

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

In the decades after 1520 the people of Western Europe experienced a thorough religious transformation. Instead of one Western Christendom centered in Rome a variety of competing interpretations of true Christianity emerged that were able to translate their assumptions into viable and enduring institutions. Among the emerging persuasions one group was unique, however: its members, scornfully called "catabaptists" or " anabaptists" - re-baptizers - by their opponents, rejected the millennia-old idea of the corpus christianum which postulates the unity between the ecclesiastical and political domain. For the Brethren, as they called themselves, the secular world was not an aspect of …

Introductory Remarks, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

This issue of the SAHS Newsletter is given almost entirely to a genealogical article by Leo Schelbert and Sandra Luebking that has previously been published in the Summer 1977 issue of Pennsylvania Folklife (Vol. XXVI, No. 5). We are grateful to Dr. Don Yoder, editor of Pennsylvania Folklife, for permission to copy the article in its entirety. Schelbert and S. Luebking, a teacher and genealogist in Chicago, have added an index of the names in all their spelling variations that should prove helpful to users of the annotated checklist.

The Institute Of Texan Cultures, The Swiss Texans1978, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

This is an illustrated, indexed brochure, 26 double-columned pages in length. The Swiss are introduced as "The most cosmopolitan immigrants to come to Texas with the least reason for coming ... " This statement contains important clues about the nature of Swiss emigration and the difficulties of writing about it. Due to the absence of strong outside determining factors such as "ideological oppression, economic depressions and natural catastrophes," decisions to leave Switzerland were almost always individually colored. There were no more or less uniform mass emigrations and very few large-scale settlement enterprises. The phrase "most cosmopolitan" in the introductory quotation …

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Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Biography Of J. J. Von Grueningen, John Paul Von Grueningen

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

My father, Johann Jakob von Grueningen, who for thirty-four years served as pastor of the Reformed Church at Sauk City, Wisconsin, was born in Gstaad, Saanen Parish, Canton Bern, Switzerland, November 23, 1845, and died at Sauk City, May 23, 1911. From the time of his college days at St. Chrischona he used the older spelling of his family name. In explaining the variant spellings of the name, he writes in his memoirs:

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Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Introductory Remarks, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

This, the first nurrber of the fourteenth volume of the SAHS Newsletter, contains only two parts, the report of our 1977 annual meeting in Philadelphia and a biographical account of the life of J. J. von Grueningen, a 19th century Swiss immigrant to Wisconsin, by his son John Paul von Grueningen who was an active member and officer of the SAHS during its Madison years (1940s). I find this biographical sketch not only lively and colorful but moving at times and full of descriptive insights into the hardships of 19th century immigration.

The Fourteenth Annual Meeting Of The Swiss American Historical Society, Bruno Gujer, Leo Schelbert

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

The fourteenth annual meeting of the reactivated SAHS was beld on Saturday, October 29, 1977, at the Faculty Club of the University of Pennsylvania, located on 36th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Editorial Statement

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Table Of Contents

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Looking Back And Looking Forward, Enok Mortensen

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If the newly formed Danish-American Heritage Society is to accomplish what it so boldly visualizes it must focus on two primary aims.

It must somehow convince, it not thousands, then at least a substantial number of Danish-Americans of the importance of its stated purposes, so that the Society can be adequately supported and become a vital force. Secondly, it must solve the difficult problem not only of collecting archivalia, but of maintaining central depositories, museums, or at least some kind of cultural service center. Swedish-Americans have their fine institute at Minneapolis, Norwegians their St. Olaf's and Decorah, and Finnish-Americans have …

The Limits Of Ethnicity, Irving Howe

The Bridge

Americans have often defined themselves through an unwillingness to define themselves. In the work of our greatest writers, notably Melville and Whitman, the refusal to succumb to fixity of definition comes to seem a cultural signature.

In opposition there has arisen a native industry of America-definers who offer a maddening plenitude of answers. But people in a hurry with answers have usually not even heard the questions. And finally it all comes to the same thing: many answers equal no answer.

Heritage, Johannes Knudsen

The Bridge

The term "heritage" brings up associations of "heredity" and this again reminds us of genes and the genetic code. Heritage in this sense is terribly important. We are programmed by our genes. Our appearance and condition are pre-determined in many ways, ranging from the color of our eyes to the state of our health and the potential of our mind, and including negative as well as positive features. Genetic heritage can be a blessing and it can be a burden. It has the greatest significance for the individual, but is also an important corporate factor. Ethnic groups have genetic features …

Do Your Homework!, Thorvald Hansen

The Bridge

I once heard a young American ask a Danish visitor whether or not he was acquainted with the inquirer's uncle in Denmark. It quickly developed that the only thing which the young man knew about his uncle was his family name. Incredible as it may seem, such things happen and though to a lesser degree, they happen frequently when a search is made for overseas ancestors. Denmark is a relatively small country and the unspoken assumption is often made that everyone there knows everyone else and, therefore, one need only know the name and the fact that an ancestor came …

Some Thoughts On Acculturation, Otto G. Hoiberg

The Bridge

Three years ago an important work entitled Flight to America - The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants was published by Kristian Hvidt(1), Head Librarian of the Danish Parliamentary Library in Copenhagen. Dr. Hvidt's painstaking demographic study of 58 handwritten volumes of data ralating to America-bound Danish emigrants between 1868 and 1914, together with computer analysis, revealed a wealth of interesting information relating to the age, sex, family status, occupation, motivation and other characteristics of the people concerned.

Ribbons Of Memories, Ed Sundberg, Gerda Sundberg

The Bridge

Gerda and I are in our mid-fifties. We have survived and enjoyed nearly thirty-five years of marriage, three sons, three daughters-in law, and four grandchildren.

We are not sitting back in our rocking chairs waiting for the kids to drop by or bemoaning the fact that each year our hair is a little greyer. We don't have time for that. And we're not flying off to Timbuktu, Shangri La, or any place else to "start a new life."

Elfrida Pedersen Collection, Clinton M. Hyde

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Elfrida Jensen, born September 13, 1886, in Horsens, Denmark, came to Seattle with her parents ca. 1904. Within a short time she had a role in a Danish play presented by the Danish Young Peoples Society "Dagmar". Her association with this Danish Dramatic Club (later called Harmonien) lasted a lifetime. Besides playing the lead roles in many Danish plays, "Frida", as she became called, wrote and adapted scripts, wrote songs and poems in Danish and English for the stage in Washington Hall in Seattle and for parties and wedding anniversaries.

Oscar W. Lund (1862-1953) A Memoir, Harald Hans Lund

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He was twenty years old when he stepped aboard the S.S. Hekla in Copenhagen to work his way to a country where he had no acquaintances and did not know the language. Fifteen days later Oscar Lund landed in New York City.

"There were streets which it was almost impossible to cross because of the great number of vehicles of all sorts," he notes in his diary. "One feels that he has come to the great free America."

Danes Came To Central Wharton County In 1894 Bringing Church, Language, Culture, John L. Davis

The Bridge

The grass reached to the bottoms of the wagons when the first group of Danes came to central Wharton County, Texas, in 1894. Land had been bought by J. C. Evers, an agent for the Danish Folk Society, to be resold to immigrants. The Dansk Folkesamfund was interested in founding an agricultural settlement in which the Danish culture and language, and the Lutheran church, might be preserved. Like many people who came to Texas, the settlers were looking for a new place to live - a place they could farm and raise their children .

The Danes In Winther's Trilogy, Norman C. Bansen

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The harsh and forbidding aspects of immigrant life pervade Sophus Keith Winther's trilogy dealing with the experience of the appropriately named Grimsens, a Danish farm family in southeastern Nebraska, from the late 1890's through approximately the first quarter of the 20th century. Prominence is given to the struggle against economic odds and the problems of social adjustment in an area where there are not many Danes, so few, in fact, that the religious needs of the community are served through monthly visits of a Danish Lutheran pastor from Omaha. Den danske Pioneer provides the family with reading material and the …