dutch-American arts and letters in historical perspective

Swierenga: Nyenhuis: Kennedy (edited by)

Van Raalte Press

Across Borders: Dutch Migration to North American and Australia

Unknown, Author

The role of Dutch American immigration to and settlement in Wisconsin - in contrast to the accounts of the Dutch in Michigan and Iowa - has been overlooked or minimized over the years. Early scholarship often betrayed the anti-Catholic bias of Protestant researchers, and the settlements in Wisconsin were clearly more isolated from each other than those in Iowa and Michigan, which allowed them to develop patterns unlike those elsewhere. The papers from this conference begin to explore the heretofore largely untapped history of Dutch kolonies in Wisconsin and the East.

Diverse Destinies: Dutch Kolonies in Wisconsin and the East

Kennedy, Nella / Risseeuw, Mary / Swierenga, Robert P. (editors)

Dutch Americans And War : United States And Abroad

Robert P / Kennedy Swierenga

Dr. Paul G. Fried (1919-2006), professor of history and director of international education at Hope College (Holland, Michigan), often spoke of writing a memoir of his family’s World War II experiences. He did leave extensive autobiographical notes, carbon copies of at least ten thousand personal letters, and published papers in thirty-five boxes that presented an opportunity for Stephen Hemenway to write an edited version of his life. Early chapters focus on his European boyhood, refugee status in Czechoslovakia and England and Cleveland, unsuccessful efforts to save his parents and brothers from Holocaust deaths, exploits as an American soldier with the Ritchie Boys, and translator status at the Nürnberg Trials (especially with the case of Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker). Later chapters recall his advanced degrees from Harvard and Erlangen Universities, work as a liaison officer for the US Air Force to British Intelligence, founding of the Hope College Vienna Summer School (in existence from 1956 to the present), teaching career, devotion to international education, and fascination with automobiles, world travel, art collections, and philosophical and religious insights.

Hope Beyond Borders: The Life and Letters of Paul Fried

Biographies & Memoirs

Hemenway, Dr. Stephen I.

Historical

Park Township Centennial History 1915-2015

Robert P. Swierenga

Papers from the 2015 AADAS Conference

Sharing Pasts: Dutch Americans through Four Centuries (The Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (AADAS))

History

Aay, Henk

Americas

IntroductionKenneth SchaafOur life’s journey sometimes takes us to places we never intended to go. We set our destination, establish our route, and make our reservations. But then the unexpected occurs, there is a delay, an accident, a reroute, a complete change of plans. This certainly was the case for a hapless band of Dutch travelers on their trip to America during the late winter and spring of 1853. A few turned back before it began. Others would soon regret not having done likewise. But like many journeys, once begun, there are few opportunities to go back or start over.It is through a rich collection of found journals, letters, personal papers, nineteenth-century maps and nautical charts, period travel literature, and a host of newspaper accounts from both sides of the Atlantic that we follow a group of emigrant travelers on their perilous voyage, from their tightly woven Frisian heritage into a new American tapestry.Accounts of life journeys have been around for as long as our race has felt compelled to move from one location to another, as in the Biblical account of the wanderings of the children of Israel, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Longfellow’s Tales of the Wayside Inn, and even our contemporary travelogues. For the duration of the journey, there is an intersection of lives, a cultural exchange, a common shared experience. Then, suddenly, the trip is over, our travelers go in different directions, and their stories, repeated less and less often, are soon forgotten.In Peter H. Wood’s thorough study of Winslow Homer’s painting, “Gulf Stream,” he wrote, “There is no older or richer artistic image than that of a boat and its occupants at the mercy of the mighty sea.” With that analogy, he went on to suggest, “We are each lost at sea in the modern world; we are ignored by remote ships and buffeted by passing squalls, and we have as much hope of controlling our fearful destiny as [Homer’s] luckless mariner . . . it will take Divine Providence to save us.”You and I are on our once-only life journey, traveling through time over unfamiliar seas. Our experiences, though common to all, are our adventures, our challenges. Although we sometimes think we are better equipped than generations past to handle what may come, our twenty-first century intellect and technology still appear inadequate to safely see us through what we are presented in life. We make choices along the way, and we like to believe we are in control. But where we begin, when, and with whom, are not of our volition. Our Creator, in His wisdom and knowledge, has determined the where, when, how, and with whom. Like the band of Frisian travelers who left their homes so many years ago, we are called to trust Him to pilot us through the journey, from start to finish.Jacob E. NyenhuisEditor-in-Chief, Van Raalte PressRelying on broad reading and focused research, Kenneth Schaaf constructs a narrative that is part detective story, part drama, and part character study as he recounts the fate of ninety-two Frisians who set out for America in 1853. He draws upon maps and charts, personal journals, letters, shipping schedules, brief newspaper accounts, and interviews with descendants of the survivors, but he also learned the process of ship building and the history of the development of the British railway in the 1830s and 1840s, studied a painting of Liverpool from that era, and traced the lives of each of the crew members and passengers. At once individual and universal, In Peril on the Sea should appeal to a broad audience. The epilogue, appendix, bibliography and index also provide invaluable detail for genealogists and scholars.Robert P. SwierengaEighty-six Frisians boarded the William &amp; Mary, en route to America. After weeks of sailing, they found themselves abandoned at sea by captain and crew aboard their sinking vessel. Readers interested in transatlantic passages under sail will not be able to put this book down.

In Peril on the Sea: The Forgotten Story of the William & Mary Shipwreck

Schaaf, Kenneth A.

In this publication of the papers from the 21st biennial conference of the Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (June 2017 in Pella, Iowa), Janel Curry guides us in “reading” agricultural landscapes, which begins with discerning large-scale, global patterns of immigration, such as who came and whence and when they came. Robert Swierenga’s contribution is a wide-ranging overview of Dutch involvement in the production of celery “on the muck.” Ken Bult’s article focuses on Dutch farmers growing “onion sets” around South Holland, near Chicago, and not far from his own hometown. Wisconsinite Mary Risseeuw tells the story of the pea-canning factories in her state in the early and mid-twentieth century. Donald Sinnema discusses two key inventions made by Dutch Canadians to help keep soil from drifting after plowing. The two immigrant Koole brothers, of Monarch, Alberta, introduced strip farming in 1918, and twenty years later, their nephew invented the Williamson single V-blade. Janet Sheeres employs her characteristic talent for sleuthing out neglected topics by telling about 19th- and early-20th-century Dutch immigrant farmers (and their descendants) in Wayne County, New York. Michael Swanson looks at his own locality, the mostly rural, Whiteside County, Illinois, as a place where Dutch immigrants put down roots. Most of them were farmers who remained so in Whiteside County. David Zwart examines the rural, farming sensibilities of the midwestern Dutch in the twentieth century, as shown in the mini-histories composed for significant anniversaries (like centennials), as well as in Tulip Times, pageants, and other celebrations. Justin Vos illustrates the decisive role religion played, even more than ethnicity, in the case of a typical Dutch immigrant family. Vos draws upon 185 family letters, written during a period of over thirty years, translated and published in the Netherlands in 1999, to show that religion was the foundation of at least some immigrants’ communal experience. Henk Aay is a geographer and relies principally on letters as the basis for his contribution. Aay’s thorough study of the immigrants’ (and visitors’) environmental observations, knowledge, and behavior relies on their private letters and memoirs, as well as their published articles and letters in Dutch American newspapers and other publications. Jan Boersema, aided by yet another Dutch-born scholar, Nella Kennedy, has a much narrower focus than Aay. These coauthors tell the sad tale of the unforeseen, sudden extinction of the passenger pigeon in America during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is also one of the great mysteries of our time that so numerous a species should vanish so quickly, first from urban dinner tables and ultimately from the earth. Boersema, a biologist by vocation and an environmentalist by avocation, is well qualified to tell the story, while Kennedy, a historian of art and of the Dutch American scene, has led in transcribing and deciphering the obscure, difficult document used as the basis of this study. Earl Wm. (Bill) Kennedy has given us the story of the erratic Rev. Hendrik Georg(e) Klijn (1793-1883), the sometime (1857) cofounder of the future Christian Reformed Church and son of a Lutheran murderer.George Harinck offers us insight into the early career and exodus of the biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos (1862-1949). Nella Kennedy, herself an art historian in public and a creative artist in private, has written on the career of a once-prominent but now little-remembered instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dutch American artist John Henry Vanderpoel (1857-1911). Huug van den Dool, professional meteorologist, introduces us to the most recent of the Netherlanders featured in our volume, the world-renowned planetary scientist Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973).

Dutch Muck and Much More: Dutch Americans in Farming, Religion, Art, and Astronomy (The Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (AADAS))

Kennedy, Earl Wm.

A. C. Van Raalte Institute Silver Jubilee 1994-2019: Annual Report 2018-2019

Reference

Nyenhuis, Jacob E.

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