History Commons^™

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.

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.

Edgar B. Madsen. The Shoestring Letters: A Tribute To The Immigrant, Inger M. Olsen

The Bridge

Edgar Madsen’s parents, Niels and Signe Madsen, left their home and family in Denmark in 1928 to seek their fortune in the United States. For three decades after their emigration, their only contact with their loved ones back home was through letters, which inspired the name of Edgar B. Madsen’s charming, thought-provoking book, The Shoestring Letters: A Tribute to the Immigrant. After being stored in a thatched roof attic for decades, the letters Niels and Signe sent to their loved ones in Jutland came to light when the family cleared out their grandfather’s house; they made their return journey …

My Life As A Danish American Archive And Library (Daal) Intern, Chantal Powell

The Bridge

Scouring through archives provides a person with a glimpse into the details of the past not provided by just reading a history book. Homemade Christmas cards and PanAm airplane tickets, award ribbons and family pictures, newspaper clippings and handwritten letters are just a few of the details of people’s lives I got to go through and experience for myself at the Danish American Archive and Library (DAAL) in Blair, Nebraska.

The Danish Emigration Archives, Birgit Flemming Larsen

The Bridge

The Danish Emigration Archives was founded in 1932 as the DanAmerica Archives.

Max Henius, a native of Aalborg and an enterprising businessman in Chicago, was the immigrant behind the Archives. It might be seen as flexibility by Danish Americans and their descendants to place their own ethnic group's source materials at a distance to themselves. It did cause some discussions at that time.

The purpose of the Archives is to preserve the history of those Danes who left Denmark to settle in foreign countries. Through the years The Danish Emigration Archives has suffered under several changes due to World War …

The Heritage Of Niels Bohr, Russell J. Donnelly

The Bridge

Danish Americans, as publications in The Bridge attest, look back on their ancestral home with a wide variety of feelings. For a professional physicist Denmark is a legendary name, for in Copenhagen in the early twentieth century, there emerged in a remarkable way one of the greatest revolutions in human thought, the invention of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has had an enormous influence in physics and on the world, for in that brief period of time things were understood which had always evaded explanation: such as the structure and radiation of atoms and molecules, the behavior of metals, and the …

Georg Strandvold: A Progress In Journalism, Olga Strandvold Opfell

The Bridge

A bronze plaque that honors Georg Strandvold's memory hangs in Rebild's Blokhus, succinctly summing up the influence he had in his time on thousands of Danish Americans: Skirbent og redaktor i i Amerika i 57 ar. Trofast talsmand for Danmark.

That long career was also versatile. During those 57 years Georg Strandvold wrote for the best known Danish newspapers in the U.S. - Norden, Nordlyset, Den Danske Pioneer, Ugebladet, Dannevirke, Bien - and worked on two American dailies, the Racine Journal and the Grand Forks Herald. For 31 years he also sat on the editorial staff of Decorah-Posten, the largest …

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

The Bridge

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 …