European History Commons^™

Questioning Our Danish Heritage: The Evolution Of An Ethnic Identity, Otto N. Larsen

The Bridge

Here we are over one-hundred persons ranging in age from 9 to 90 gathered for the first Pacific Northwest Danish Cultural Conference. Given the title of my remarks, I had better start with a question: why are we here?

The general answer must be that we are here to re-kindle the experience of our heritage, to learn more about it, and to enjoy our common bond. It is often said that whenever Danes get together they have a good time, even if they are melancholy about it.

The Fixed Frame And The Live Show, Johannes Knudsen

The Bridge

Television has developed a trick of ending a story or a sequence by showing a fixed picture of the final frame, giving a rather vivid expression to the immediate or concluding situation. Sometimes this picture is amusing, even ludicrous, evoking a smile; sometimes a tear lingers on.

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

The Bridge

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.

One Of Many, Dagmar Potholm Petersen

The Bridge

On an early spring evening in the year of 1891 a young man stood leaning against the rai I of the steamship Tekla of the Danish Tingvalla Line, his dark hair blowing in the breeze and his blue eyes riveted on the scene before him. He was entirely oblivious to the commotion around him, even to the boisterous calls of his shipmates, "We're there - at last we're there - soon we'll be picking up gold from the streets and licking honey from the trees."

The Feilberg Letters: A Danish Family's Reflections On Canadian Prairie Life, Jorgen Dahlie

The Bridge

So wrote Aksel Sandemose, noted Danish-Norwegian writer and himself an immigrant to Canada in 1927. When he spoke of iron determination and perseverance, he might well have been describing the Ditlev and Julie Feilberg family, a small part of whose experiences in Canada are recounted in the excerpts which follow. Without making too extravagant a claim for the uniqueness of any one immigrant encounter with a new land, one is nonetheless forced to acknowledge that each individual or family brought with them their own special cultural and intellectual resources. A reading of the Feilberg letters reveals that this family had …

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.

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.

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The Bridge

No abstract provided.

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

No abstract provided.

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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

No abstract provided.

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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Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

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Biography Of J. J. Von Grueningen, John Paul Von Grueningen

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

My father, Johann Jakob von Grueningen, who for thirty-four years served as pastor of the Reformed Church at Sauk City, Wisconsin, was born in Gstaad, Saanen Parish, Canton Bern, Switzerland, November 23, 1845, and died at Sauk City, May 23, 1911. From the time of his college days at St. Chrischona he used the older spelling of his family name. In explaining the variant spellings of the name, he writes in his memoirs:

Front Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Introductory Remarks, Heinz K. Meier

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

This, the first nurrber of the fourteenth volume of the SAHS Newsletter, contains only two parts, the report of our 1977 annual meeting in Philadelphia and a biographical account of the life of J. J. von Grueningen, a 19th century Swiss immigrant to Wisconsin, by his son John Paul von Grueningen who was an active member and officer of the SAHS during its Madison years (1940s). I find this biographical sketch not only lively and colorful but moving at times and full of descriptive insights into the hardships of 19th century immigration.

The Fourteenth Annual Meeting Of The Swiss American Historical Society, Bruno Gujer, Leo Schelbert

Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter

The fourteenth annual meeting of the reactivated SAHS was beld on Saturday, October 29, 1977, at the Faculty Club of the University of Pennsylvania, located on 36th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.