The Dutch American Identity: Staging Memory and Ethnicity in Comm ...

Henry Lucas’ Netherlanders in America is the foundational work on Dutch immigration, settlement, and the subsequent history of the Dutch-American community. Published in 1955, this encyclopedic volume remains a valuable source of information, but, of course, it is a bit dated. The same is true of Jacob Van Hinte’s Netherlanders in America: A Study of Emigration and Settlement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the United States of America (1928), Arnold Mulder’s Americans from Holland (1947), and Gerald F. De Jong’s The Dutch in America, 1609–1974 (1974). The current dean of Dutch-American scholarship is Robert P. Swierenga, who edited The Dutch in America: Immigration, Settlement, and Cultural Change (1985), a collection of essays on the Dutch-American experience that significantly raised the bar of scholarship on this subject and introduced a variety of topics and perspectives not addressed by earlier scholarship. Swierenga’s most recent contributions are Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820–1920 (2000), which summarizes some four decades of Swierenga’s research on Dutch immigration and Dutch-American history, and the massive Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (2002) which, while focusing exclusively on Chicago-area Dutch-American communities, nevertheless provides important insights into the Dutch-American community at large. The essays in The Dutch American Experience: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Swierenga (2000) continue to advance the cause of research into Dutch-American history, society, and culture. In addition, Henry Lucas (Dutch Immigrant Memoirs and Related Writings), Herbert J. Brinks (Dutch American Voices: Letters From the United States, 1850–1930), and Johan Stellingwerf (Iowa Letters: Dutch Immigrants on the American Frontier) have collected and translated many letters and memoirs of Dutch immigrants, thus making valuable firsthand accounts of Dutch immigration and settlement accessible.

One final area of scholarship deserves mention. There has, of course, been a great deal of scholarship on festivals and the concept of festival. Part of the scholarship on festival has been, as well it might be, concerned with setting out a festival vocabulary.