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The Bridge

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My Grandfather: Soren Lorentz Lassen, Karen Lassen

The Bridge

Fifty-five years aft er my grandfather’s death in 1934, my two brothers and I gathered at his gravesite in Sault Ste. Marie near the Great Lakes. For the fi rst time, Soren Lassen was being honored by a family that he never knew. Although he had died long ago, his gravestone had only recently been put in place. I pulled the scissors I had brought out of my purse and carefully cut back the crabgrass that was already creeping across the new stone. Stepping back, I read it aloud:

Svend Lawrence

(Soren Lassen)

1864-1934

My Father, The Christmas Doctor, And The Danish Nurse Who Saved His Life, Tom Weber

The Bridge

My father, Dr. John Peter Weber, was born to German immigrants in Creston, Iowa in 1888. At the age of eleven he realized he wanted to become a doctor. After finishing the eighth grade in 1904, sixteen-year-old John rode the rails to Montana to help lay railroad tracks, intending to save his wages in order to continue his education. Treated brutally by his foreman, he left the railroad construction job and traveled to Portland, Oregon, searching for work in the lumber industry. The young man from Iowa fell victim to a pickpocket on the streets of Portland. All his savings …

Danish Midsummer: My Bodtker Grant From Dahs, Kelsi Vanada

The Bridge

Though many Americans can trace their family history back to their European ancestors, I have met very few people outside of my own family who have maintained relationships with the branches of their families still living in Europe. I have always been proud of the fact that I know many of my family members living in Denmark today. These ties between the Danish and American sides of my family are strengthened every time one of us travels to visit relatives in the other country, so I am extremely grateful that the Danish American Heritage Society (DAHS) awarded me an Edith …

A Danish Lad In America, Fred Delcomyn

The Bridge

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So said L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between (1953). Looking back on myself as a young immigrant child in Detroit at mid-century, the phrase seems especially apt. In my past I was quite literally in a foreign country.

Growing Up In Junction City, Oregon. A Memoir., Lois Christiansen Eagleton

The Bridge

I grew up in a Danish world in America. It seemed that all of my relatives and most of our family friends were Danes. Though my parents did not speak much Danish at home, mainly because their families had come from different parts of Denmark and they could not agree on pronunciation, I learned when I went to college that I had a few Danish words in my vocabulary that I had no idea were not English.

Back Cover

The Bridge

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Memories From Rudbøl, 1923-1927: My Teaching At Rudbøl Danish School, M.R. Mikkelsen

The Bridge

All four of my grandparents emigrated from Denmark in the 1890s. The first time any member of my immediate family visited Denmark was almost a century later, when my wife Marge and I, together with our two sons David and Philip, went over to spend an eight-month sabbatical leave from Iowa State University in Denmark in 1981.

Front Cover

The Bridge

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Inside Cover

The Bridge

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Front Matter

The Bridge

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Editorial Statement

The Bridge

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Contributors

The Bridge

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Contents

The Bridge

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Prohibition Among Danish American Lutherans, Nick Kofod Mogensen

The Bridge

On January 17, 1920, a major change took place in American society. The Eighteenth Amendment went into effect and started the Prohibition Era, banning the sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. Prohibition was not a uniquely American idea. Under pressure from temperance movements, most Nordic countries banned or severely restricted the sale of alcohol around the same time as the United States did. The Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, and Finland all banned alcohol during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Although a narrow majority of the Swedish people refused an outright ban in …

Social Narrative And Sustainability Of A Danish Diaspora Community In The American Midwest, Craig A. Molgaard, Amanda L. Golbeck

The Bridge

This longitudinal study (1972-2015) focuses on the largest Danish American speech community in the United States of America, which is in Audubon, Cass, Pottawattamie, and Shelby Counties in western Iowa (the towns of Elk Horn, Kimballton, Audubon, Harlan, Exira, and Atlantic). The sociolinguistic mechanisms (code switching, speech acts, storytelling) of Danish social and cultural narrative are identified and examples are provided. We examine the social aspects of sustaining identity and heritage in a now globally linked community, and note lessons learned for other communities seeking to sustain their heritage in a healthy and productive fashion.

Saving The American Farmer: The Impact Of Danish Agricultural Practices On American Policy Direction, Byron Rom-Jensen

The Bridge

“We are not Denmark.” This assertion by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a national debate in early 2016 as a retort to Senator Bernie Sanders’ calls to learn from Denmark evoked little surprise. The greater surprise was, in fact, that the discussions of Denmark had gone this far. It certainly seemed remarkable when Sanders, shortly aft er announcing his presidential candidacy, praised Scandinavian social programs in areas such as childcare and education, and encouraged Americans to learn from these policies. Such a pronouncement ran counter to traditional path-dependent explanations for American domestic policy, according to which government programs …

Selected Poems By Emil Aarestrup

The Bridge

The name of the Danish physician and poet Emil Aarestrup is associated with sensual, erotic poetry in which a sharp, anatomical eye for the beauty of the human body is joined with a profound narrative about love in a single embrace. In Aarestrup’s works the body comes alive. His erotic gaze is ever-present as a layer of desire in his work, just as his sense of the all-inclusive joy of the embrace conceptualizes pleasure of an explosive and outrageous kind. This was incompatible with the puritanical petit-bourgeois self-restraint and human isolation of the period in which he wrote. This celebration …

Book Reviews

The Bridge

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End Matter

The Bridge

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Full Issue

The Bridge

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Review: 'Unfinished Business: Screening The Italian Mafia In The New Millennium', Renato Ventura

Global Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book review on Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millenium by Dana Renga. University of Toronto Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781442615588.

#Instagramele: Learning Spanish Through A Social Network, Pilar Munday, Yuly Asencion Delaney, Adelaida Martín Bosque

Languages Faculty Publications

Social networking (SN) tools have the potential to contribute to language learning because they promote linguistic interactions in person-to-person communication, increasing the opportunities to process input in the L2, engaging learners in negotiation of meaning and requiring learners to produce L2 output, as proposed in the interactionist theory by Long (1985, 1996). These virtual personal connections with other learners and language experts around the world could provide a rich environment for sociocultural language exchanges (following the principles of the sociocultural approach proposed by Lantolf, 2002, based on the work of Vygotsky, 1978) that may increase motivation for learning, develop L2 …

Learning To Live With The Other Germany In The Post-Wall Federal Republic, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

After forty years of separation, neither the West Germans nor the East Germans were prepared for the impact of reunification. But had the peoples of the two countries developed separate cultural identities to such an extent that the dissolution of the border represented merely the illusion of a return to sociocultural community? Since the collapse of the East German state in 1989 and the subsequent suturing of divided Germany in 1990, scores of books and articles have been published on the economic and political conditions that led inexorably, or less so, to the demise of the GDR, as well as …

«El Mundo Del Exilio Es Parte De Nuestra Historia Y De Nuestra Cultura». Entrevista A José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta, Iker González-Allende, José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

En esta entrevista, realizada en verano de 2015, José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta traza su trayectoria vital y profesional, indicando el ambiente familiar en el que creció, los estudios que realizó, los maestros que más le influyeron y su interés en el exilio vasco. Asimismo explica qué es el exilio como categoría y departe sobre su posible vivencia como una realidad enriquecedora y sobre las diferencias y factibles trasposiciones entre el exilio y la emigración. Ascunce Arrieta presenta también un amplio panorama del exilio vasco, señalando los distintos exilios que ha sufrido Euskadi a lo largo de su historia y la …

Referencias Cortesanas En La Obra De José Navarro: Los Virreyes De Cerdeña Y Margarita Teresa De Austria, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

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La France Et Le Plurilinguisme: Deux Opposés Qui S'Attirent? Une Étude De L'Enseignement Et De L'Apprentissage Des Langues Étrangères En France., Rachel L. Lorch

Senior Independent Study Theses

Dans un monde si interconnecté que le nôtre, la capacité de bien communiquer et d’échanger de l’information avec des autres devient indispensable. Ainsi, le rôle des langues étrangères dans une variété de sociétés représente un sujet très pertinent. Cette étude se focalise sur l’enseignement et apprentissage des langues étrangères en France. Je voulais savoir si les Français sont vraiment en retard en ce qui concerne l’apprentissage des langues étrangères, surtout en comparaison avec les autres pays d’Europe. Pour répondre à cette question, j’analyse l’histoire de la politique linguistique en France, une variété de documents récents rédigés par les gouvernements français …

Perspectives Of Ethical Identity In Ng's Steer Toward Rock And Jen's Mona In The Promised Land, Hui Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Perspectives of Ethical Identity in Ng's Steer toward Rock and Jen's Mona in the Promised Land" Hui Su examines Fae Myenne Ng's and Gish Jen's novels. In the novels, the protagonists make different decisions: in Steer Toward Rock Jack after displacement in China adopts US-American identity and in Mona in the Promised Land Mona, a second generation Chinese American, selects Jewish identity. Owing to their different situations, the two protagonists reflect challenges of identity building in the case of the "Other" in US-American culture and society. Su argues that Ng and Jen, although varying in their …

Luo’S Ethical Experience Of Growth In Mo Yan's Pow!, Zhenzhao Nie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Luo's Ethical Experience of Growth in Mo Yan's Pow!" Zhenzhao Nie examines the protagonist's experience of self-discovery in the process of natural to ethical choice. Nie's analysis of the novel rests on the theoretical framework "ethical literary criticism" he developed. In the novel Luo's life is narrated in retrospect when he is attempting to become the disciple of a monk and al-though Luo does not find what he is searching for in religion, he arrives at a new stage in his life which is based on ethical principles. The young Luo is unable to make …

Ethical Discourse And Narrative Strategies In Yan's老师，好美 (To My Teacher, With Love), Zhuo Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ethical Discourse and Narrative Strategies in Yan's老师，好美 (To My Teacher, with Love)" Zhuo Wang discusses the way in which narrative converges with ethics at the site of a radical "ethical environment" in Geling Yan's novel. Wang focuses on how the novel's first-person confessional narration, third-person reflective narration, and online narration dialogue with and interrogate one another working together to bring forth Yan's reconsideration of the ethical dimensions of her text. Wang argues that the novel's personal and social ethics are embodied multiple narrative voices which altogether reflect on the close relationship between novels and ethical discourse …