This blog post has a different title, but is “Part II” of the previous post, “DUTCH REFUGEES FLEEING GERMAN INVASION, 1940.” It includes the second half of letter that is part of our World War II Collection, 1940-2011 (COLL 454, Box 8, Folder 21), dated Friday 10 […]
Heritage Hall has a rich collection of documents related to World War II. They offer windows into the experiences of Dutch people who lived through the war and the German occupation, members of the resistance movement, and American soldiers. The document below is part of […]
The previous two blog posts started a story told by Dan Poortenga about his great grandfather Peter Oudshoorn. Dan first wrote this story as a paper in a Calvin College history course in the early 1990s. He interviewed his great grandfather and set his story […]
Our previous blog post started the story of Peter Oudshoorn emigrating from the Netherlands to the United States in 1904, as told by his great grandson, Dan Poortenga. Dan first wrote about Oudshoorn in an assignment for a Calvin College history course in the early […]
This week’s blog post is based on a paper by Dan Poortenga, who graduated from Calvin College in 1992. In a history course on the Netherlands with Herb Brinks, then curator of Heritage Hall, Dan wrote an essay about his great grandfather, Peter Oudshoorn, who […]
Pierre Van Paassen lived a life of contradictions. He was a pacifist who set aside his principles to serve in the Canadian military and later returned to pacifism of a sort. He was a journalist who made up stories and bounced around jobs from Canada […]
Tulip Time in Pella, Iowa, seems so innocent in this mid-twentieth century postcard from the E.C. Kropp Co. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But was this ethnic festival a sign of something untoward in the American heartland? Were Dutch Reformed “colonies”–as the immigrants themselves called them in […]
Klaas Niemeijer’s life was typical for an immigrant, and yet quite unique. He was a man on the move, first back home in Europe and then in his new home in America. Niemeijer moved to Germany around 1900 to work in a coal mine and […]