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The Wayfarer, Enok Mortensen, Nanna Mortensen, Translator

The Bridge

He stood on the deck and shivered in the raw morning air. It was beginning to get light but the dawn was veiled in a heavy wet fog. There was no rain but the air itself seemed like one big mass of cold wetness. He couldn't see anything at all but he kept standing there, nevertheless.

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Danish American Political Behavior: The Case Of Iowa, 1887-1936, Stephen H. Rye

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Although thousands of Danish immigrants settled in Iowa, often in communities which can readily be identified, there is some difficulty in isolating voting units which were composed largely of Danish Americans. For example, Fredsville, a settlement located west of Cedar Falls in Grundy County, became the home of a sizeable Danish community, but in the voting unit of Fairfield Township, census materials demonstrate that the non-Danish voters slightly outnumbered the Danes in the late nineteenth century. However, at least five Iowa townships can be identified as having a clear majority of voters who were Danish in background, and this study …

Thoughts At Sunrise, Olaf R. Juhl

The Bridge

Good Morning - and will the class please come to order.

Could it be that I choose this opening because I, as far back as I can remember, wanted to be a teacher? Somehow I never quite made it, although I believe that I could have if circumstances during a certain period of my youth had not had other designs for me. Let me add that any regrets I might have today are purely of a sentimental nature.

This morning we shall attempt to analyze the trials and tribulations, the mental problems and misgivings of an American, by adoption, in …

P.S. Vig And The Americanization Issue During World War I, Peter L. Petersen

The Bridge

World War I and the Americanization campaigns which accompanied it had a pr0found impact upon ethnic relations in the United States. Although German-Americans bore the brunt of rapidly emerging anti-foreign sentiments, no ethnic group was totally free of suspicion and public condemnation. In Iowa, Governor William Lloyd Harding defended his proclamation forbidding the public use of foreign languages by attacking the Danish element in the Hawkeye State's population. According to the Governor, who was speaking before a large crowd at Sac City on July 4, 1918, young Danes in Iowa were not getting a proper American upbringing. Pointing to the …

"Schools For Life", Harold Petersen

The Bridge

A man having read Schools For Life remarked, "It is a good book, but Enok still hasn't told us what a folk school is." I doubt that there is any living American today who knows better what a folk is than Enok Mortensen. If he has not defined what a folk school is through the pages of his book it is because- the folk school cannot be defined in such a way that it has- meaning to a person who does not know what the folk school is. It has to be experienced . It carries with it a spirit …

"Heinrich Tonnies", Egon P. Bodtker

The Bridge

Heinrich Tonnies has been known to Danish archivists and photo-historians primarily for his topographical views of Aalborg. His pictures made Aalborg the second most photographed city in Denmark in the 19th century. Alexander Alland has ensured Tonnies a place among recorders of social history by the exhibit in Aalborg he arranged in 1975. For this redirection of our attention we in D.A.H.S. and others are indeed thankful.

Membership Form

The Bridge

Please enrolI me as a member of the DANISH AMERICAN HERITAGE SOCIETY. GENERAL MEMBERSHIP (ind ividual or family) . $ 10.00

SUSTAINING MEMBERSHIP (individual or family) . $ 25 .00

I would like to support the Danish American Heritage Society with an additional contribution of $

Johannes V. Jensen's Discovery Of America, Inga Wiehl

The Bridge

Johannes V. Jensen, the most influential Danish writer of the century and Nobel prize winner, chose to live his life in Denmark; yet it is entirely conceivable that given two, he would have spent one in this country. He is rightly acclaimed among his contemporaries as the first Danish writer to have pointed the way westward. His writings show the influence of America and her people as well as of American writers, notably Walt Whitman.

Homage To Hans Christian, Henrik Nordbrandt, Nadia Christensen, Translator

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Now I understand all the statues you had to pose for how hard it's been to sit still, casting shadows

over the lawn, where children like those now clambering on your bronze must have played laughing, in a twitter of birds

while you, shut out from the game, tried desperately to resemble the picture of yourself that made you seem most harmless.

Simple Psychoanalysis, Henrik Nordbrandt, Nadia Christensen, Translator

The Bridge

Especially the ordinary things about the day make the day especially depressing. It's quite ordinary. Especially in autumn. The autumn afternoon

keeps even thoughts of suicide and dreams of distant exotic places from being taken seriously. Which doesn't mean they're fun.

Back Cover

The Bridge

The DANISH AMERICAN HERITAGE SOCIETY was established in 1977 in order to accomplish the following:

Preserve and promote interest in Danish American traditions.

Collect, evaluate, preserve, and display records (books, pictures, letters) as well as other artifacts pertaining to the life and culture of Danish Americans.

Encourage Danish American expression in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Promote research into the life and culture of Danish Americans and serve as an agency through which resulting studies might be shared and published.

Book Review: Les Derniers Puritains, Pionniers D'Amérique, 1851-1920., Lukas Burckhardt

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

Théodore Bost was born in 1834 at Carouge near Genea, emigrated in 1851 to St. Paul, Minnesota, became a farmer in nearby Carver County, stayed in Minnesota until 1887 and then moved to Pomona near Los Angeles and died in California in 1920. His wife, Sophie née Bonjour from Neuchâtel, born in 1835, married him in 1858 and died in 1922. Both stood firmly in the protestant tradition. The Bost family, with its pastors, missionaries and even a pioneer in social work for handicapped children, shows how strongly the religions spirit of Geneva has influenced many lives of its citizens. …

Contents

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Notes From The Editor, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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The Swiss-American Family De Steiguer, J. E. De Steiguer

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

The following pages present an overview of the 500-year history of the Swiss-American family de Steiguer. It is a story which depicts the gradual rise and abrupt decline of a family within one of the most exclusive aristocracies of 18th century Europe and their subsequent settlement in the frontier states of America.

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 …

Front Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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