From the President:

I cannot remember how many times I have driven across Wisconsin on Interstate 90/94. But most of those trips—lasting hours upon hours—seemed to take forever. Likewise, I cannot remember how many times I have flown over that same highway at an altitude of 33,000 feet and at a speed of 575 miles per hour. Flying compresses that route and distance into a few minutes. If the weather is good, I can even see the minuscule cars hurtling down the highway at 70 miles per hour. Both the drivers down there and I up there think we are going very fast. But my plane will be over the Lake Michigan shoreline before the drivers stop for lunch at truck stop near the Wisconsin Dells.

Fernand Braudel, the French historian, noted that time and history pass at different rates of speed, depending on how one looks at them. There are the long-term trends, things like the rise and fall of great empires or processes like industrialization. Then there are the intermediate trends, the lifetimes of average people in those empires and factory towns. And finally there are the passing events, the headlines in yesterday’s newspaper heralding the arrival of a new tax collector or the price of eggs at the market. When we do history, we often work in reverse order. By reading yesterday’s headlines in sequence, we reconstruct the life of a person or a community. By looking at a series of lives we discover patterns that survived for generations and those that eventually passed into disuse. Large scale patterns of behavior formed the building blocks of empires.

None of these insights can be chiseled in granite monuments because we constantly uncover new angles that need to be measured. The accumulation of more time by itself will change the configuration in the kaleidoscope. And suddenly we will understand something about the past in a way we never did before. Many times my airplane window view of Interstate 90/94 is obscured by clouds—remember the plane flies over Wisconsin. But, some times, the wind shifts and the highway that looks so long from the driver’s seat is exposed as the short stretch of concrete it really is, at least as seen from 33,000 feet.

And so the need for and the fascination with history do not end. We keep on looking back to better understand our ever-changing surroundings, and to make the future a little less obscure. The turbulence in the air betrays the presence of the lake beneath the clouds. The historian looks for the facts that disperse the clouds to reveal what once existed— for insight, understanding, and the sheer joy of discovery. AADAS is about sharing these things.

Robert Schoone-Jongen
University of Delaware

New Website on Dutch-American Relationship

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands) in The Hague, is host of a digitisation-project called Het Geheugen van Nederland (The Memory of the Netherlands). The project is responsible for digitising important sources of the Netherlands’ cultural heritage and will result in a website, Atlantic World, that offers easy access to at least sixteen digital collections from an equal number of heritage institutions. The digital collections are made available without charge. The website also has an educational section with lesson ideas for teachers. The material to be digitised includes illustrations, written material, sound and moving pictures.

The Atlantic World website—a result of the co-operation between the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague and the Library of Congress in Washington—will pay special attention to migration movements and the exchange of ideas between the Netherlands and the United States. Atlantic World can be found via the addresses listed below.

Five aspects of the mutual past will be dealt with:

• the early presence of the Dutch in North-America and the rise of New Netherland and New Amsterdam, 1609-1664;
• the Dutch 19th Century migration movement into the Mid-West region of the United States;
• the 1945 – 1960 Dutch migration movement into the United States;
• Dutch interest in and involvement with the American struggle for independence;

(Continued on page 3)

Most Dutch immigrants to America in the 19th and 20th centuries headed to rural areas—in Iowa, western Michigan, and other scattered rural communities. This conference turns its focus to the Dutch experiences in urban America, especially Chicago, Detroit, and other urban centers.

Dr. Robert Swierenga, research professor at the A. C. Van Raalte Institute and noted scholar on the Dutch immigrant experience, will kick off the conference with a general lecture on the urban experience in Dutch immigration history.

Scholars from the Netherlands and the United States, specializing in the study of the Dutch in North America, will then present the results of their current investigations on various aspects of Dutch immigrant experience in urban settings. Some presenters represent academic and research institutions; others are individuals conducting independent research.

The conference will also feature panel discussions of two important books that have been recently published—Suzanne Sinke’s Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920, and Robert Swierenga’s Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City.

The Saturday morning sessions concentrate on the Chicago setting. Local persons who cannot attend the whole conference are invited to these sessions.

On Saturday afternoon the Dutch Heritage Center will sponsor a bus tour of Roseland, originally a Dutch enclave on the south side of Chicago, and neighboring Pullman, where many of the Dutch found employment in the famous Pullman Works.

You are cordially invited to an exciting and informative conference on the campus of Trinity Christian College, on the southwest side of Chicago.

Presentations and Panels

Session: Commercial Activities
    Hans Krabbendam, Consuls and Citizens: Dutch Diplomatic Representation in American Cities
    Geoffrey Reynolds, Built Along the Shores of Macatawa: The History of Boat Building in the Holland, Michigan Area, 1837-2002

Session: Intellectuals
    Huug Van Den Dool, A Small Biography of a Famous Dutch American Mathematician: George David Birkhoff (1884-1944)
    Gerlof Homan, Torn Between Two Faiths? American Calvinist Leonard Verduin and his Anabaptist/Mennonite Connections

Session: Rural and Urban Connections
    James Evenhuis, Detroit's Motor City Dutch: Early Years of the Reformed and Christian Reformed Churches
    Robert Schoone-Jongen, Financiers and Farmers: The Urban Roots of Rural Dutch Communities in the Upper Midwest
    David Zwart, On the Periphery: Dutch Immigration to the San Joaquin Valley

Session: Education and Information
    Janet Sheeres, The Struggle for the Souls of the Children: The Effect of the Dutch Education Law of 1806 on the Emigration of 1847
    David Snyder, Transmitting the Dutch View: The Netherlands Information Service in Postwar America

Panel on Suzanne Sinke's book: Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920
    Panelists: Kathleen De Haan, Hans Krabbendam, Janet Sheeres, Lisa Zylstra

Session: Dutch Chicago Stories
    Joel Beeke, History of the True Dutch Reformed Church of South Holland, Illinois
    Paul Petraitis, The Crossroads to Freedom: Dutch Immigrants and Escaped Slaves
    David Zandstra, In the City But Not of the City: Delivering Local Perishable Produce to Urban Customers

Panel on Robert Swierenga's book: Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City
    Panelists: Martin Essenburg, Melvin Holli, James LaGrand

We have substantially redesigned our Heritage Hall website. As part of our redesign, we have brought the Origins pages up to date and added links to text versions of the book reviews from recent years. Also, from our “Family History Resources” listings and descriptions of all donated family histories can be obtained. Listings of the material in our Dutch Immigrant Letters collection is also available. Although our main URL remains www.calvin.edu/hh/, the redesign required most of our other URLs to be changed. Readers may need to update any bookmarks to our site.

During the past six months we have completed organizing records from a variety of twentieth century organizations related to the Dutch in North America. Major collection completions include 24 additional cubic feet to the archives of Calvin Theological Seminary and 18 cubic feet from the Social Research Center added to the Calvin College collection. We have processed records from the General Secretary’s office of the CRCNA , and also from such various related groups as Dynamic Youth, Christian Reformed Conference Grounds, and The Committee for Women in the Christian Reformed Church.

Archival records from 90 CRCNA congregations were received, microfilmed and returned. We also microfilmed the records of three Christian school organizations. The microfilm copies are stored in our vault and are available only with the written permission of the individual congregation or school.

We are pleased to report that the Historical Directory of the Christian Reformed Church, the first in a publication series sponsored by the Historical Committee of the Christian Reformed Church, is currently in page proof stage and should be available by summer. This directory will include all minister, churches, evangelists, missionaries, chaplains and other workers who have been part of the denomination’s various endeavors. The directory will exceed 500 pages and sell for about $35.

Richard Harms

The Joint Archives of Holland
Hope College

Since its May 2002 debut, the video Tulip Time in Holland has met with much applause and was broadcast on our local Public Broadcasting Services channel, WGVU, at Grand Valley State University on May 13. Later this year, this title and two others, Story of Holland (2002) and History of Hope College (2001), will be available for sale to the public as a fundraiser.

Our next video project will be the documentation of the Latino experience in the West Michigan area since migration began in the 1930s. We will be using the same film and production crew as we did for the previous three videos with Fall 2004 targeted as the completion date.

A new collection now available for researchers is that of William H. Penn and his pioneering Dutch-American immigrant ancestors and those with whom they interacted. These ancestors include Cornelius Kuyper (Kuijper), John Brandt (Jan Brand), Jacob Pen, Annigje Stobbe, and Maartje Dalenberg. The majority of the papers come from the Roseland, Illinois, and Calumet County area near Chicago, where Cornelius Kuyper was an important settler. There is correspondence with relatives and friends in the Netherlands. The collection also includes early (1850-forward) correspondence with Dutch immigrants in America, in such places as Kansas and Kalamazoo. Correspondents include Jan Bos and Cornelius Hillegonds, and many materials relating to genealogy and the family trees of Brandt, Kuyper, Eenigenburg, Dalenberg, Ton, de Jong, and Penn (Pen) are also included.

Geoffrey Reynolds

New Website (continued form page 1)

• the ‘Holland-mania’ that evolved around the closing of the nineteenth century in the United States.

Call for cooperation
At this moment we are constructing the first draft of the site documenting the Dutch-American connection. I encourage you to submit ideas for documents that can be shown on this site, be it immigrant letters, pictures of homesteads, maps, autobiographies etc. representing the Dutch immigrant experience in the nineteenth century as in the post World-War II period. I also invite you to contact me with ideas about establishing links to websites of institutions and organizations dealing with the cultural legacy of the Dutch in the United States. We welcome your suggestions.

The first phase of the project will be launched July 2003. All other aspects will gradually be introduced.

Dirk J. Tang MA, Projectmanager
(070) 314 02 33 or dirk.tang@kb.nl

websites: www.kb.nl, www.geheugenvannederland.nl, www.loc.gov, and http://memory.loc.gov