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Transplanters on the Grasslands and the Fruits of Chain Migration
This narrative describes the transoceanic and internal migration pattern and resulting settlements across the Midwestern grasslands by Dutch immigrants in the nineteenth century. The transplantation process involved repeated pioneering and community formation that exhibited persistent culture transfer and ethnic identity, even as necessary adaptations occurred because of environmental imperatives and contextual change. The Dutch settlers maintained highly recognizable enclaves in Marion and Sioux counties in Iowa and in Douglas and Bon Homme counties in South Dakota. This study retells their history with fresh insights into precise configurations of the colonies with demographic specific city and discussion of economic pursuits and social attributes. Special attention focuses on agricultural developments in the emerging Corn Belt. The book includes two biographical accounts of individual immigrants that provide concrete examples to flesh out the larger portrait of the migration and resettlement experience.
Dutch Farmer in the Missouri Valley
The letters Dutch immigrant Ulbe Eringa wrote home from the United States are rich with information on farming, the family, the household economy, church activities, and school involvement as he related them to his relatives back in the Netherlands. His memoirs, written in 1942 and 1943, supplement the letters and provide details about his life before emigrating. Brian Beltman's introduction and chapter-by-chapter commentary place Eringa's story within its historical context, complementing findings that there has been more continuity than discontinuity between the European past and the American ethnic experience.
Dutch American Voices
Brother I cannot tell you what is best for you—staying there or coming here. If it only concerned yourself! would say, stay. But if you are concerned about your descendents I would say, come." Writing from his Michigan farm to relatives back in Overijssel, Jacob Dunnink voiced a perspective at once uniquely his own and typical of his immigrant community in 1856. Dutch American Voices brings together a full spectrum of such perspectives, as expressed in immigrants' letters to their families and friends in the Netherlands. From the terse notes of first-time writers to the polished chronicles of skilled correspondents, the letters are presented in engaging English translations that capture th...
Hidden Worlds
In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. They brought with them an array of cultural and institutional features that indicated they were a "transplanted" people. What is less frequently noted, however, is that they created in their everyday lives a world that ensured their cultural longevity and social cohesiveness in a new land. Their adaptation to the New World required new concepts of social boundary and community, new strategies of land ownership and legacy, new associations, and new ways of interacting with markets. In Hidden Worlds, historian Royden Loewen illuminates some...
The Nation's Crucible
In 1803 the United States purchased Louisiana from France. This seemingly simple acquisition brought with it an enormous new territory as well as the country’s first large population of nonnaturalized Americans—Native Americans, African Americans, and Francophone residents. What would become of those people dominated national affairs in the years that followed. This book chronicles that contentious period from 1803 to 1821, years during which people proposed numerous visions of the future for Louisiana and the United States. The Louisiana Purchase proved to be the crucible of American nationhood, Peter Kastor argues. The incorporation of Louisiana was among the most important tasks for a generation of federal policymakers. It also transformed the way people defined what it meant to be an American.
From the Inside Out
Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community "inside out." The writers featured were ordinary rural people: young women and grandmothers, rural preachers and landless householders. They include a teenaged boy who immigrated from Russia to Manitoba in 1875 as well as a successful merchant, a traveling evangelist, and a devout, conservative church elder. An elderly grandfather recounted the daily circuit of his ...
Iowa History Reader
In 1978 historian Joseph Wall wrote that Iowa was “still seeking to assert its own identity. . . . It has no real center where the elite of either power, wealth, or culture may congregate. Iowa, in short, is middle America.” In this collection of well-written and accessible essays, originally published in 1996, seventeen of the Hawkeye State’s most accomplished historians reflect upon the dramatic and not-so-dramatic shifts in the middle land’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marvin Bergman has drawn upon his years of editing the Annals of Iowa to gather contributors who cross disciplines, model the craft of writing a historical essay, cover more than one significa...
Emigrant Tales of the Platte River Raids
While the Civil War raged in the east, the Platte River Raids would begin an entirely new battle for the American West. In July of 1864, Northern Plains Indians in Idaho Territory (Wyoming) appeared to be on a warpath to cease all emigrant travel on the Bozeman, Oregon, and Overland Trails by any means. On a signal, hundreds of warriors launched a series of attacks and robberies on unsuspecting emigrants through the winding “Black Hills.” Shots rang out and arrows whizzed as miners, doctors, farmers, families, and war widows rallied their covered wagons together. Some fought to defend their stock and protect their families. Others helped bury the bodies of those who did not survive. Read the eyewitness testimonies of nearly 70 survivors, vetted by living descendants, mapped out, annotated, and presented in one accord for the first time in literary history.
A New Language, A New World
An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process.
