European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Editorial Statement

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

From The Translator’S Desk, Michael Goldman

The Bridge

On the Saturday morning of the fortieth anniversary conference of the Danish American heritage Society, translator Michael Goldman gave a talk in which he interspersed readings from his translations of five accomplished Danish authors with his personal recollections and anecdotes. The texts he read included the first major publication of Benny Andersen’s poetry in english translation; the first english translations of Cecil Bødker’s adult novels Stories about Tacit and The Water Farm; the first ever book publication in english of Knud Sørensen’s Farming Dreams, a selection of poetry about the decline of family farms in the latter half of the …

Hygge & Lykke: Good Old Danish Enclosures Or Gates To A Brave New World?, Poul Houe

The Bridge

every year since becoming a Danish expat some forty-five years ago, I’ve spent part of each summer in Denmark. 2017 was no exception, but unlike previous years, this time I reflected explicitly on something most Danes probably take for granted or don’t pay much attention to: their country’s global reputation as the hyggeligste and lykkeligste place on earth (although Denmark came second to Norway in the global happiness rankings in 2017).1 Denmark’s reputation as the happiest (lykkeligste) place on earth is increasingly matched by the claim that it harbors the coziest (hyggeligste) culture imaginable. Many observers and commentators have credited …

Danish Creativity And Resilience In The Face Of Adversity, Delane Ingalls Vanada

The Bridge

Danish people are known for being innovative thinkers. They are independent, willing to take risks, able to stand up for their thoughts and beliefs, daring enough to commit themselves without fear of failure, and deeply trusting of each other. They are hardworking, flexible, and intellectual (Nordic Reach 2008). This is the stuff of creativity and the dispositions that support it, according to current research on the psychology of creativity (Piirto 2001). As the granddaughter of Jens Peder Jensen, a Danish immigrant who homesteaded in South Dakota in 1907, my life was shaped by the influence of our close family in …

Integration Challenges And Langkær Gymnasium, Nete Schmidt

The Bridge

Denmark used to be a fairly homogenous country where stereotypes of homogenous Nordic-ness could be happily and easily applied. Immigrants, often seasonal farmworkers, were invariably white. A young woman named Stefania was one of the many Poles who came to Lolland-Falster in the years 1893–1929 to work in the sugar beet fields in order to send money back to her family. She was thirteen when she arrived, with fake papers. At that time, Danish farmers and squires often hired young Polish women to do the most difficult work in the fields—weeding and harvesting the sugar beets. At the time, this …

The Role Of Migrant Churches In Danish Integration, Julie K. Allen

The Bridge

Christian religious belief has been a central factor in the creation and maintenance of Danish cultural identity for more than a thousand years, but it has also been an integral part of Danish interactions with the rest of the world. Although the Frankish monk Saint Ansgar (801–865)—the patron saint of Scandinavia—is often given credit for converting the pagan Danes in the ninth century, it was King harald Bluetooth’s baptism in 965 Ce that made religious identity and religious conformity a fundamental principle of membership in the Danish state. For the next nine centuries, the exercise of religious belief in Denmark …

To The Edge Of The World: Jens Munk And The Danish Search For The Northwest Passage, 1619-20, Otto Christensen

The Bridge

On May 9, 1619, a worshipful dedication service was held in Christian IV’s newly built church—holmen’s Kirke in Copenhagen. The service was arranged for a group of sixty-four sailors and their families to bless the crew and ships before they started on their expedition. Their goal was to find the route to China and India by sailing a northwestern route. The hope was to reach their destination by Christmastime. After the service, a procession took the participants down the canal to the two waiting ships. They were towed out of the harbor and set sail.

From Ærø To Iowa: Documenting The Journey Of Danish Immigrants To Audubon And Shelby Counties In Iowa, Cynthia Larsen Adams

The Bridge

The island of Ærø lies southwest of Copenhagen, in the Baltic Sea. Just south of the city of Odense, it is connected to the mainland by ferries. Between 1850 and 1920, nearly two thousand of Ærø’s residents decided to immigrate to the United States. When the first emigrants left Ærø the island had three major port towns—Marstal, Ærøskøbing, and Søby. Marstal was well known for its shipbuilding, which made it a local economic power base, while Ærøskøbing was the chief town and primary port for ferry traffic. Aside from sailors, ship’s captains, and shipbuilders, most of the island’s residents were …

The Jutland Heath As A Literary Place Of Inheritance: Hans Christian Andersen, St. St. Blicher, And Jeppe Aakjær, Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen

The Bridge

The Jutland heath was, in a certain sense, created by Danish writers. It was writers such as Steen Steensen Blicher, Meir Goldschmidt, hans Christian Andersen, Jeppe Aakjær, and Johannes V. Jensen who, in their literary depictions, gave the heath a voice, image, and form that made it accessible as a place of experience for their own and future ages. In doing so, they created a place of inheritance—a dynamic, living place of experience that we can possess forever and refer to as part of our cultural inheritance. Today, the heather-clad heath of Jutland exists only in small clumps that have …

Answering Democracy's Call : U.S. Citizen Enlistees In The First World War Canadian Expeditionary Force, June A. Mastan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study explores the close relationship between Britain, the United States, and Canada at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The true closeness of this relationship becomes more evident throughout the First World War when issues of citizenship between the three nations assumed a substantial level of fluidity. Analyzing the motivations that compelled almost 36,000 U.S. citizens to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the First World War provides a window through which we can view this relationship. Some citizens of the United States sought to join the war effort through military service, even though their country was a …

Midwifery And Rhetoric: The Power Of Rhetoric In Influencing Social Attitudes About Authority In Female Reproductive Care, Mei Chan Lund

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Nowhere are the effects of that rhetoric on the practice of midwifery more evident than in the reactionary works of midwives themselves, such as those of Justine Siegemund and Jane Sharp in the seventeenth century. This paper will explore how the strategies and allusions used in Siegemund's The Court Midwife of the Electorate Brandenburg and Sharp's Midwives Book allow for the conclusion that gendered literary rhetoric was the primary cause of the shift from female to male authority in the practice of midwifery.

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Stasi Brainwashing In The Gdr 1957 - 1990, Jacob H. Solbrig, Jacob Hagen Solbrig

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the methods used by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), more commonly known as the Stasi, or East German secret police, for extraction of information from citizens of the German Democratic Republic for the purpose of espionage and covert operations inside East Germany, as it pertains to the deliberate brainwashing of East German citizens. As one of the most efficient intelligence agencies to ever exist, the Stasi’s main purpose was to monitor the population, gather intelligence, and collect or turn informants. They used brainwashing techniques to control the people of the GDR, keeping the populace paralyzed with fear …

Women And Carriages In 17th-Century Aragonese Burlesque Poetry, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

During the 17th century, literature turned the growing number of carriages into a burlesque topic. There were countless poems written about traffic jams, accidents, or the proper way to ask a friend for a carriage, often considered a symbol of status. Literary references to carriages can tell us many things about the men and women who used them, as well as about gender stereotypes. Women and carriages were understood as interconnected elements in Early Modern Spain; carriages appear as a means to conquer feminine muses as well as a recurrent satirical topic even for women poets. This article analyzes some …

Back Cover

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

An 1880s Invitation To Buy Land In East Missouri And In Arkansas, Robert Wells

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Gottfried Egger And Johann Riitschi: Two Reports Of Swiss Emigrants Returning From The United States, Fabian Brandle

Swiss American Historical Society Review

In his most recent , global history oriented study Jochem Oltmer, the noted German historian of migration concisely summarizes reasons for an actual migration. 1 Poverty was blocking social mobility, and generally absent life prospects or hoped for religious or political liberties in the destination country may also have been involved ; but there were always personal, biographical motives at play in the decision to change one's position for a time or for good and to risk a new and generally difficult start somewhere else . Individual circumstances such as the breakup of a relationship, piled up debts, conflicts with …

Swiss In Washington, D.C. To Late 1887: A Report, Adelrich Steinach

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

A Swiss Artist, An Iconic American General And An Ambitious Federal Councilor, David Vogelsanger

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Lexington, October 22, 1869. A man boards a canal boat returning from the small Virginia town to a known world , Washington D.C., New York and eventually home to Switzerland . In his luggage he carries a large oil portrait sti ll smelling of fresh paint. Frank Buchser has just finished one of his best paintings, lived some of the most remarkable four weeks of his adventurous live and experienced a kind of political conversion .

Book Review: Clive Church, Political Change In Switzerland: From Stability To Uncertainty, Kevin Cronin

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

You Are What You Eat: Gastronomy & Geography Of Southern Spain, Katherine F. Perry

The Catalyst

Using empirical and numeric data, this study explores the use of food as a proxy to understand the cultural-historical geography of southern Spain. After spending three months in Granada, Spain, I compiled the most commonly used thirty-five ingredients from a selection of Spanish cookbooks and contextualized them within the broader history of Spain. The elements of traditional Andalucían cooking fit into three primary chapters of Iberian history: Roman occupation, the Moorish invasion beginning in the 8^th century, and the Columbian exchange, or the exchange of goods that took place between the Americas and Old World following European discovery of …

Remembering To Prevent: The Preventive Capacity Of Public Memory, Kerry E. Whigham

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

It is without doubt the case that memory of the past has been and is being used in certain places to justify radical intolerance and unspeakable violence. But for every instance where that is the case, a dozen alternative cases exist where memory creates cohesion, positive change, and a less violent society. This article focuses on the instances where memory does the latter. It first discusses why and how the formation of a public memory culture can be preventive of future violence. Next, it introduces several categories of memory practices, each of which exemplifies the embodied nature of public memory, …

Historiographical Perspectives Of The Third Reich: Nazi Policies Towards The Arab World And European Muslims, Jesus Montemayor

History Faculty Publications

This historiographical essay examines major works on the interaction of Nazi Germany and the Arab World in general and the European Muslims in particular. The essay argues that despite the claims of revisionist studies that emerged after 9/11 terrorists attacks, the Nazi influence among the Arab and European Muslims was not deep enough to produce sufficient Muslim and Arab support for the Nazi cause.

Clemence Of Barking And Valdes Of Lyon: Two Contemporaneous Examples Of Innovation In The Twelfth Century, Lisa Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Twelfth Century in Western Europe was a remarkable time in history. Scholars have noted that Roman law was being revived, Aristotelian theory was being studied, Romanesque and Gothic art was being produced, scholasticism was being cultivated, and economic growth was being fostered by the rise of towns. These are just some of the developments that help give this era the well-known term “twelfth-century renaissance.” Despite the flourishing of creativity that this label suggests, there are few surviving, specific examples of innovation from this time that have been passed down to us. In AD 1175 the Benedictine nun Clemence of …

When We Were Monsters: Ethnogenesis In Medieval Ireland 800-1366, Dawn Adelaide Seymour Klos

Master's Theses

Ethnogenesis, or the process of identity construction occurred in medieval Ireland as a reaction to laws passed by the first centralized government on the island. This thesis tracks ethnogenesis through documents relating to change in language, custom, and law. This argument provides insight into how a new political identity was rendered necessary by the Anglo-Irish. Victor Turner’s model of Communitas structures the argument as each stage of liminality represents a turning point in the process of ethnogenesis.

1169 marked a watershed moment as it began the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. English nobles brought with them ideas of centralized power. In …

Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations And Colonial Legacies [Table Of Contents], Teresa Fiore

Sociology

By linking Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country’s colonial legacies, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present.

Fiore rethinks Italy’s formation and development on a transnational map through cultural analysis of travel, living, and work spaces as depicted in literary, filmic, and musical texts. By demonstrating …

The Gotthard Base Tunnel In A Historical Perspective, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The Gotthard Base Tunnel project which had a triumphant opening in June 2016 was one of the once in a century projects which deserved a fitting celebration. Alastair Jamieson, NBC reporter, noted that "yodeling and a triumphant Alpine horn heralded the inauguration Wednesday of the longest, deepest railway tunnel ever constructed-a feat of engineering that will slash journey times across Europe."

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.