History Commons^™

Hollywood’S Toughest Stunt Clan Comes From Gossau, Canton St. Gallen:, Roland Schäfli

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Hans Epper from eastern Switzerland conquered Hollywood as a stuntman in the 1930s. His descendants continue to perform death-defying stunts for Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg to this day. A family history like something out of a movie.

When Hans Epper arrived in New York on Whit Monday (the day after Pentecost) in 1926, he gave his name as “John” to the immigration authorities.

He discarded “Hans” just as he wanted to discard his origins: his past in the eastern Swiss municipality of Gossau. An official at the town hall of the industrial village in St. Gallen had scribbled “Off …

Book Review, Marianne Derron

Swiss American Historical Society Review

As historian Jürg Flückiger writes in the title, this story is only “almost forgotten.” It is well known that during World War II, many foreign citizens who had ended up in Switzerland for a variety of reasons were interned there. While some were there voluntarily, fleeing the Nazis, others had ended up in Switzerland in the course of actual combat operations, but would have preferred to avoid this exile. This was the fate of a number of American fighter pilots whose planes had been damaged over Germany and had to make emergency landings in Switzerland.

Sahs Advisory Board, 2025–2028

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

President’S Annual Report, Thomas Quinn Marabello

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The past year has been a very busy and fruitful one for the Swiss American Historical Society (SAHS), with many developments and achievements. We formed new partnerships, engaged in outreach, published a book, began our centennial plans, and gained 35 new members (many of whom are not Swiss)!

2025 began with us awarding a grant to Celeste Onchuck, an SAHS member and doctoral student who is writing her dissertation about Huldrych Zwingli and her ancestors, the Gallmann family who immigrated to South Carolina (her article exploring some of this is in this issue). The grant allowed Celeste to travel to …

Publications Report, The Editorial Board

Swiss American Historical Society Review

2025 was a busy year for the Editorial Board. In addition to publishing three issues of the SAHS Review, we also completed editing and publishing Helvetic Heights: A Human History of the Swiss Alps by our own Richard Hacken. The book has been well received by members and others as a comprehensive history of people living and working in the Swiss Alps since prehistory.

The February 2025 issue of the SAHS Review featured five interesting and very different articles. Thomas Quinn Marabello researched and wrote about the connection between Zermatt, Switzerland and Vail, Colorado. The founders of Vail, a ski …

Swiss Chapter Financial Report, Kurt Morf

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Annual Financial Report Of The Swiss American Historical Society, Ernie Thurston

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Submitted to the Annual Membership Meeting, Oct. 4, 2025, in New York City

Website & Social Media Report For 2025, Richard Hacken

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The Society’s website (https://swiss-american-historical-society.org) has undergone a series of positive changes this year. This is one case where an “upgrade” has not become a “downgrade” in disguise! The Menu (which is where you can access links to other pages on the website) is now more minimalistic, sleek, and user friendly. You will also find a newly inserted search button that helps you find keywords from the entire site.

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

The Religious Groups Of Mecca And Medina In The Sixth And Seventh Centuries Ce, Ilkka Linstedt

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

Ancient and modern urban centres have been important loci for encounters between individuals of different identities. In this article, I present Mecca and Medina as multi-religious towns in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods of the sixth and seventh centuries ce. Mecca was a very small town, but the Kaaba shrine there served as a regional pilgrimage site that drew people from different faith communities. Medina was a larger settlement with a significant Jewish population. Jews, Christians and others (‘pagans’) lived in both towns. Some of these ‘others’ had also adopted some of the basic ideas of monotheism, although they …

Alma Gildenhorn:, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Alma Lee Gildenhorn (née Alma Lee Gross), born on January 14, 1932, in Baltimore, Maryland, is a distinguished American philanthropist, civic leader, and cultural advocate whose life exemplifies service, generosity, and dedication to the public good. Over the course of more than seven decades, she has played an influential role in advancing education, strengthening U.S.–Swiss relations, promoting the arts, and supporting countless community institutions.

End Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Swiss Settlers On The Nebraska Prairie In The 1880s, Karl Horat

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Hundreds of thousands of emigrants from all over Europe, as well as many Americans, were attracted to the West in the nineteenth century. It was the time of the “Homestead Act,” a law for land settlement signed by President Abraham Lincoln. It had taken force on New Year’s Eve, 1863.

Among the early settlers in the Great Plains of Nebraska in the 1880s were landless Swiss farmers. The presence of two families from the Bernese Oberaargau, Lisette and Ueli Uhlmann-Schütz, along with Annelies and Hans-Ueli Kleeb-Heiniger, was documented on 19th century photographic plates. The black and white pictures illustrate both …

Front Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Officers (Executive Board)

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Thomas Quinn Marabello became President of the Swiss American Historical Society in November 2024. As president, he is focused on increasing membership, organizing engaging and interesting annual meetings, and supporting young historians.

Beth Zurbuchen has been Vice President of the Swiss American Historical Society since November 2024. She served as President of the Swiss Center of North America in New Glarus, Wisconsin from 2009 until retiring in April 2024.

Barbara Müller joined the SAHS in 2013, became Vice President of the SAHS Swiss Chapter in 2016 and is President of our sister organization, Friends of the Swiss American Historical Society …

Swiss American Historical Society Annual Business Meeting Report, Jane C. Maurer

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The meeting was called to order at 9:30 AM. Observed Moment of Silence to remember longtime members who passed away in the past year (Dr. Heinz B. Bachmann, former SAHS President and Treasurer; Heinrich L. Wirz, Max A. Gonzenbach, Fred C. Moser, Richard Blatter and Paul R. Judy).

Annual Membership Report

Swiss American Historical Society Review

We have 208 current members, a 1% increase over the 205 reported last year at this time. We received a donation of $10,000 from the Northlands Foundation. And one of $1,000 from the Gonzenbach Family Foundation, in honor of former member Max Gonzenbach (now deceased.). Other members made extra contributions this year totaling $1,240, and one became a Life member.

Friends Of The Swiss American Historical Society (Sahs) Switzerland Chapter, Barbara Müller

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The Swiss Chapter of SAHS held their annual general meeting and outing in St. Legier, Canton Vaud at the Pepperdine University campus in the renovated Château d’Hauteville on September 10th, 2025. The château belonged to Pierre-Philippe Canac, who installed Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods on the château roof when he built it in the 1760s. It then passed through marriage to Daniel Grand, the youngest son of Franklin’s French banker. The installed lightning rods still protect the château today from the storms passing over Lake Geneva. Pepperdine has done a wonderful job in renovating the château and keeping it for generations …

The Identity Of Tamar Church (D. 1789), Of New Marlborough, Massachusetts, Charles H. Smith,

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Discussion of Tamar Church of New Marlborough, Massachusetts

Fit For A Princess: Connecting Britain And The ‘Moluccas’ In 1621 And 2011, Emily Soon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

A Feminine Flame In The Midst Of Repression: The Concealed Role Of Women In The Isolated Siberian Tundra, Jenny N. Liang

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

The modern Russian state is distinctive in her history of utilizing the isolated Siberian tundra for eliminating political dissent, with millions of dissidents disappearing into penal colonies, labor camps, and gulags, some never to reappear. Of the incomprehensible mass of numbers are the stories of steadfast wives refusing to abandon their husbands, women surviving the brutal political prison camps, and girls manipulated as political pawns into Siberia. In a historically patriarchal Slavic society, the stories of women have been conveniently pushed aside. The distinctive Russian practice of exiling political dissidents to the remote Siberian tundra has led to stories of …

American Women's Clubs In The Nineteenth Century: The Case Of The Female Relief Society Of Nauvoo (1842-1844), Adithi Nythruva

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

Throughout the nineteenth century, women’s clubs provided American women with the space to influence the patriarchal-dominated public sphere and venture beyond their traditional domestic roles. This paper demonstrates that the Relief Society women developed a more nuanced relationship with feminist agency through their initiatives. Through an analysis of 33 sets of meeting notes from the society’s early years, this paper argues that the Relief Society women established feminist agency by exercising female authority, addressing scandals and injustices, and building a sisterhood. Additionally, through feminist agency, the Relief Society paralleled, and pre-dated the activities of many popular women’s clubs during the …

Revolutionary Governance, Culture, And The Party-State In Postcolonial Guinea: Political Thought And Practice Under Ahmed Sékou Touré, M. Sekani Corbie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis reexamines the political thought of Ahmed Sékou Touré by taking seriously the theoretical ambition of the Guinean revolution. Rather than treating Touré as either a failed democrat or a mere ideologue, the study reads his writings and political interventions as a sustained attempt to resolve a core postcolonial problem: how to construct collective power and mass participation in societies fractured by colonial rule, economic dependency, and weak institutional capacity.

Through close readings of Touré’s major texts and the ideological materials of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée, the thesis reconstructs his theory of the Party-State as a distinctive …

The Constant Cause Of Friction: Maud Mosher And Gendered Authority In The Indian Service And At Ellis Island, Ella Morton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on the federal career of Maud Mosher, who, from 1893 to 1907, worked as an Indian Service boarding-school teacher, then a matron at Ellis Island. By analyzing Mosher’s extensive, complaint-driven correspondence and personnel files, as well as an unpublished memoir, I claim that her grievances represent a rare form of agency available to women in maternalist roles at Progressive Era federal agencies. Though Mosher’s superiors branded her complaints trivial, the substance of them reveals gendered hypocrisy and institutional contradictions inside two federal institutions dealing with racialized populations.

In both the Indian Service and the Immigration Service, Mosher …

Sometimes I Picture You Dreaming: How American Female Directors Use Women-In-Prison Films As A Pathway For Public Education And Activism In The Era Of Mass Incarceration, Nicolette Natale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the role of female directors in creating media that showcases how prisons perpetuate sexism or gender-based violence. As mass incarceration began to take off in the 1970s, this paper begins with an analysis of Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971), which often served as the model for women-in-prison (WIP) exploitation films. While Hill perpetuated the white and male gaze in The Big Doll House, Stephanie Rothman subverts oppressive gazes in her WIP film, Terminal Island (1973), and demonstrates a concern with the historical gendered realities of prison – moving beyond representations of prison on the …

No Tech For Apartheid Memory: Oral Histories Of Google Worker Organizing, Zelda Montes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The NOTA Google NYC Digital Memory Archive is a digital memory project centering the worker narrative in tech labor struggles in the wake of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Rooted in my dual experiences as a Google Software Engineer and a No Tech for Apartheid organizer, this capstone project, initially created in 2024, seeks to combat the silencing around the nature of labor organizing through expanding upon the existing archive to incorporate oral history testimonies of NOTA organizers (notechforapartheidmemory.com/interviews). After conducting 4 oral history interviews with former Google workers currently based in NYC, the videos were …

Finding Luis: A Creative Nonfiction Account Of Law & Society, Jason M. Leggett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay explores the contradictions in legal theory and human experience through creative nonfiction. Its main purpose is to argue that a truly just society requires acknowledging the profound influence of individual narratives on the law. This is supported by blending personal narratives, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry to reveal the gap between codified law and lived realities for marginalized individuals. This unique Legal Poetics methodology employs a series of six vignettes, such as the author's and Luis's shared experiences with traumatic brain injury and the denial of justice, as data. By integrating autoethnography, law as narrative, and performativity theories, …

Best Served Cold: Operation Coldstore 1963 And The Reasons For The Singapore Government’S Decision, Jiansheng Zhang

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

Operation Coldstore, launched in 1963 by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and resulting in the arrest of 113 Singaporean left-wing figures, cemented the People’s Action Party’s dominance in Singaporean politics—a position it holds to this day. Given its political and symbolic significance, Operation Coldstore remains one of the most hotly contested episodes in Singaporean historiography. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including declassified British documents, newspapers, and political memoirs, this essay evaluates competing interpretations and argues that the Singapore government’s principal motivation was to satisfy Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaya and secure Singapore’s merger with Malaya. By emphasizing …

Imagined Nations: Ireland, Palestine, And The Politics Of Anti-Colonial Memory, Grace P. Wingerter

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This paper covers the life and career of notable IRA operative Brendan “the Dark” Hughes and how his thoughts on the “Armed Struggle” or “Cause” changed over time. Brendan Hughes was forced to frequently deal with violent and heavy handed discrimination from Protestants, which led to him joining the Paramilitary movements as a result of frustration and misplaced youthful vigor. Brendan played a major role in the Troubles through his planning of prolific violent attacks such as the Four Square Laundry attack, Bloody Friday, and the H Block blanket protest and subsequent hunger strike in the Maze Prison. Brendan’s disconnect …

Voices In Transit: Intersectionality, Silence, And Political Engagement In Ride-Sharing, Soran Tarkhani

Commonwealth Review of Political Science

Abstract This study examines Uber as a digitally governed “third space” for political discourse. Based on 4,716 ride observations from Louisville–Southern Indiana—3,676 collected in 2023–2024 and 1,040 in 2025—it uses a mixed-methods design combining multinomial logistic regression and qualitative observation. Political conversations are defined as discussions of parties, elections, policies, or major social issues. Results show that White and male passengers were most likely to initiate such talk, while African American and female riders often remained silent, consistent with Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence. African American women faced the strongest intersectional constraints. Women and LGBTQ passengers leaned liberal, while men displayed …