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| Volume 2, No. 1 |
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Fall, 2001 |
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13th Biennial AADAS Conference Held at Calvin College by Richard Harms |
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The 13th biennial AADAS Conference held at Calvin College was a great success. Audience members were informed by many of our leading Dutch American scholars. Utilizing archival data toward a new end, Elton Bruins examined the founding of Hope College largely from the letters written by Rev. A. C. Van Raalte to Philip Phelps Jr. Bruins noted Van Raalte’s deep-seated support for Christian education and strong role in the founding of the Hope school and academy, but that Phelps, as president, played the leading role in establishing the college and what became Western Theological Seminary. His efforts to establish a university failed, and worked to the detriment of Phelps's legacy. This failure has tended to overshadow his many successes. Harry Boonstra reported on the relationship between Calvin College and the Christian Reformed Church using material from his soon-to-be published book, Our School (Eerdmans). He argued that the role of the college within the denomination changed about 1960 from an institution that was largely the educational arm of the denomination with a faculty and student body that was almost totally Christian Reformed, to a college that now proclaims the denomination even though a large number of faculty (at least at the time of hire) and the majority of current student body are not Christian Reformed. The third presentation was by Don Sinnema on Chicago Christian College, a junior college that came out of the Chicago Christian High School for seven years during the 1930s. The college, largely supported by members of the Christian Reformed and Reformed churches, began in 1931 with an ambitious curriculum of 61 courses in liberal arts, pre-professional, and business. Thanks to an availability of students, enrollment quickly peaked in the fall of 1933 with 264 students on two campuses. An improving economy and the failure to attract students from Reformed backgrounds proved to be the school’s undoing in 1938. |
Jaap van Marle reported on his findings from research of the linguistic acculturation of pre-WWII Dutch immigrants to North America. He noted that Dutch Calvinists had a very atypical acculturation experience, often holding on to spoken Dutch into the third, fourth and fifth generations. Dutch Roman Catholics, on the other hand, seem to have a far more typical experience losing the Dutch after the first generation. He attributed these phenomena to their religion. The Calvinists held on to language, since it was perceived as the true language of faith, and tended to settle in rural and isolated communities where language uniqueness was possible. Taking a closer look at Dutch Calvinists in North America, George Harinck reported on his research into the reaction within the Christian Reformed Church to the secession of the Liberated Churches from the Gerformeerde Kerken in Nederland (GKN) in 1944, a secession precipitated by the suspension of Klaas Schilder in the GKN. Acting on very little evidence, due to contact limited by the German occupation of the Netherlands, CRC leaders, particularly H.J. Kuiper and Henry Beets were quick to incorrectly assume and report that Schilder’s story was a Dutch version of the Herman Hoeksema secession that had struck the CRC during the 1920s. A new methodology of utilizing Dutch immigrant letters was proposed by Hans Krabbendam. He offered a new typology in utilizing these resources. He noted that researchers had already utilized the “micro” approach of analyzing form and content, the “meso” approach of the comparative analysis of multiple letter collections to great affect. He suggested “macro” analysis as the next in the process to investigate letters and shed light on national and international conditions. For instance, this will allow for comparison of Dutch immigrants to North America to immigrants from other countries. (Continued on page 4) |
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From the President:
Some politician once said that he could succeed his predecessor but not replace him. I feel something of that upon becoming the president of AADAS. I suspect that a bit of an introduction would be in order. I am a product of the Dutch immigration which Bob Swierenga has been chronicling over the decades. My roots are to be found among the day laborers and draft dodgers who left the Netherlands a little more than a century ago and settled in the Paterson, New Jersey area. My educational experience includes degrees from Calvin College and the University of Kentucky. After spending the past twenty-six years as a classroom teacher among the Dutch of southwest Minnesota, I will be pursuing my doctorate in U. S. History at the University of Delaware. My avocation has been studying the Dutch settlements of Minnesota, especially those associated with the real estate promoter Theodore F. Koch. Encouraged by my predecessors Herb Brinks and Bob Swierenga, I have researched and written about Koch and his colonies for about ten years. While I have enjoyed the solitary work of researching, I also firmly believe that history must be accessible to a broader audience as well. That brings me to my hopes for AADAS. I see three crucial issues we should address in the coming years. First, we must continue to encourage active research into the Dutch American experience. Our conferences have done a good job providing a forum in which new directions can be explored and debated. The June meeting admirably fulfilled this function. Second, we must work to broaden our audience. The Dutch American experience is too valuable to be restricted to a relatively exclusive club of aficionados. We must do more to increased AADAS’s visibility and its support base. We have to tell the story to more people. And finally, we need to cultivate a new generation of scholars who have caught the vision and are willing to do the work which is still there to be done. There are many geographical areas with histories which have been neglected, with stories yet to be told. I have no illusions about doing all this in two short years. But I do believe it is time to start the dialogue which will produce the wisdom we need to chart our course. I look forward to working with the board, and all the members, in drawing this new map. Robert Schoone-Jongen |
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Institutional Spotlights |
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Heritage Hall, Calvin College The staff oversaw the microfilming of minutes from 70 Christian Reformed churches and three Christian school organizations. This service is provided so that a back-up copy of these important records are stored in a vault. Research use of these materials is only possible with the written permission from the individual church or school. We have begun organizing the records of the seminary and are currently working on the papers of the individual presidents. Due to research demands, we have also begun doing similar work with the denominational collection and have completed files from Christian Reformed Home Mission and Christian Reformed World Missions. In conjunction with staff from the Hekman Library, we are beginning the process of transferring often-used pictorials and textual documents to digital formats to facilitate and lessen the cost of reproduction. In conjunction with the 125th anniversaries of the college and seminary, we are working with the Calvin Library staff in a pilot project to copy documents, pictorials and sound recordings having to do with the histories of the institutions to digital formats. The material is available at http://www.calvin.edu/library/125th. Membership records assembled for several manuscript sources for two 19th century West Michigan churches (Drenthe Presbyterian and Vriesland Christian Reformed) deposited at Heritage Hall now are available at http://www.calvin.edu/hh/reshh.htm. The 125th anniversary celebrations of the college and seminary have required service on both institution’s committees, overseeing the writing and production of a 125th history of both institutions titled Love Beyond Knowledge, Grace Beyond Imagination. We also contributed the first chapter to these efforts as well as preparing and presenting a lecture in the seminary’s anniversary series. Staff have also completed proofing historic data on the 2,697 individuals who have or continue to serve as ordained ministers in the denomination and the 1,294 congregations and 300 plus mission plants that are, or have been, part of the CRCNA. The latter section contains name changes. We are now working on adding the various missionary workers and their fields of assignment to the third denominational database. Richard H. Harms |
The Joint Archives of Holland, Hope College Larry Wagenaar departed for the Historical Society of Michigan to become its Executive Director on July 1st. A reception was held on June 18, and approximately one hundred well wishers attended the two-hour reception in the reading room of the archives. On July 1, Geoffrey Reynolds became only the second director of the Joint Archives of Holland since its founding in 1988. Currently he is serving as the Michigan Archival Association's Local Arrangements Chair/Board Liaison for the 2002 Annual Meeting to be held in Marquette in June and continues as the Membership Chair. Other appointments include being named to the board of the Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (AADAS) in June. For the Western Theological Seminary (WTS) collections, we have processed and arranged for study the records of Christian Endeavor (W99-1250), the society devoted to involving youth in Christ since 1881. Founded in Maine by Francis E. Clark, Christian Endeavor was designed to enable young people to express their faith through useful works. Its message of devotion and evangelism helped it grow from a single-church society into a world movement. The WTS collections have also benefited from the processing of an addition to the papers of Marvin D. Hoff, president of Western Theological Seminary from 1985 through 1989. The addition brings the size of the Hoff collection (W88-1237.8) up to 10.5 feet. In the Holland Museum collection are the papers of Louis Hallacy II (T00-1572), a man often called “Mr. Holland.” In this case, Mr. Holland’s opus was a working lifetime of service to our community, in the form of five years as city councilman (1968-1973), six years as a three-term mayor (1963-1979), and a 20-year stint as president of the Chamber of Commerce (1980-2000). While the papers are not yet available to the public for study, they will be by this fall. To coincide with their opening, an exhibit case of Hallacy photographs, documents, and memorabilia was prepared for the Joint Archives Reading Room - including items documenting Holland’s award-winning float in the 1976 Tournament of Roses Parade. Geoffrey Reynolds |
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13th Biennial AADAS Conference (continued from page 1) Robert Swierenga’s keynote address following the banquet reviewed the state of Dutch-American scholarship, particularly since 1960. He classed immigration historians into several generations. The first generation was characterized by boosterism and heroic description. The second generation, usually trained historians, produced well documented narratives. The third generation, building upon the works from the previous two generations, applied the latest scholarship and analytical methods to the Dutch immigrant experience. He concluded with a long listing of research topics requiring further investigation. Robert Schoone-Jongen presented the results of his analysis of boosterism written by Klaas Feyma of Pine County, Minnesota and published in the Volksvriend. Describing the failure of the Dutch settlement in Vriesland, Minnesota, Feyma began his long correspondence with glowing descriptions of the immigrant experience. Although he became more open-minded with age, specifically with his acceptance of and support for popular American evangelists such as Aimee Semple McPherson, his letters are remarkable descriptors of the slow pace of acculturation of Dutch Calvinist immigrants. Careful and detailed analysis of migration of people from Noordeloos, the Netherlands, came from Huug van den Dool. Van den Dool noted that the emigrants, who left in three distinct groups from Noordeloos, were remarkably uncohesive. Most went to the Pella, Iowa area, some to South Holland, Illinois and the remainder to Ottawa County, Michigan, whose community of Noordeloos was not predominantly made up of immigrants from Noordeloos. He also reported on the religious diversity of those immigrants as characterized by such ministers as A. Betten, W.C. Wust, H.R. Koopmans, K. Van Den Bosch and Jacob Duim, a lay preacher. The Dutch Roman Catholic immigrants to Grand Rapids were examined by Cornelis Van Nuis. Van Nuis noted that a separate parish, St. Joseph’s, was established for Dutch immigrants on the city’s near southwest side and led by Fr. Henry Frencken a native of ‘s-Hertognebosch. With little help from the diocese, and often passive opposition, Frencken helped to raise funds for and then build the church and rectory. Unfortunately, Frencken saw his congregation assimilate into the larger American community very quickly within the first generation, due in large measure to the English-language instruction in the parish school. Lucas Ligtenberg traced the immigrants of Roman Catholic Iowa Dutch from the area around and including Nijmegen via New Orleans. Headed by Christiaan Verwayen, |
a lawyer, the groups sought to escape the religious discrimination in the Netherlands with its state church. Verwayen ultimately returned to the Netherlands. Although this group did not create a specific settlement as had been planned, they settled in the Keokuk and Ottumwa, Iowa area along the Des Moines River and were able to attract subsequent groups of immigrants. They had no contact with their Dutch Calvinist countrymen to the north and west. The authors have been invited to submit full-text versions of their papers for inclusion in the AADAS Occasional Papers series. Those who paid the conference registration fee automatically will receive a copy, and AADAS members will be able to purchase copies at a reduced cost.
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Selected Web Resources Cyndi's List: Netherlands Dutch Genealogical Society Nederlandse Genealogische Vereniging Dutch Genealogy Dutch GenWeb Dutch Heritage Site Dutch Telephone Directory GenLias Michigan GenWeb Project: Kent County Michigan GenWeb Project: Ottawa County |
Macatawa Bay Area History & Heritage NedGen Dutch Genealogy Search Engine Nederlandse Genealogie Zoekmachine Stamboom Stamboom Onderzoek The Unofficial Holland America Line Home Page Yvette’s Dutch Genealogy Page
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