Keyword search our books
The American Diary of Jacob Van Hinte
by Ester, Peter, Kennedy, Nell, Kennedy, Earl. Wm., editors
This diary provides a look behind the pen of Dutch American life observer and writer Jacob Van Hinte who toured the United States extensively in 1921 for his dissertation Nederlanders in Amerika: Een studie over landverhuizers en volksplanters in de 19e en 20ste eeuw in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika, completed and defended in 1928 in the Netherlands. For his “cum laude” research, the geographer interviewed ‘pastors, journalists, academics, politicians, librarians, local experts, writers, publishers, and entrepreneurs, as well as Dutch consular officials, Dutch immigrant pioneers and common people who happened to cross his path. The diary showed the pioneer Dutch immigrant historian to be a keen observer of landscape, and even the sea, as well as people, their faces, expressions and the way they interacted and behaved. His two-volume tome of over 1100 pages was translated decades later as Netherlanders in America and remains available in ample numbers at Vanderheide’s www.GoDutch.com/store. Anyone keenly interested in Dutch immigrant settlement in North America needs to read Netherlanders in America
as well as ‘The American Diary”.
"This is a charming translation, scrupulously annotated, of the long-lost travel diary of Jacob Van Hinte (1889–1948), author of the monumental Netherlanders in America. Van Hinte's energetic five-week sprint in the summer of 1921 from "Dutch" Hoboken up the river by dayliner to Albany and on to the Dutch-settled towns and cities in the Midwest convinced him that the "migration to America had been a blessing" to the Dutch. But in his brief sojourn among the descendants of the immigrant generation, he also became aware of the "tales of misery" and the "noble struggles" of the settlers that will put readers of all ethnic backgrounds to wondering about their own poignant histories."
-- Firth Fabend, author of Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and the New Jersey in the Age of Revivals
“The American Diary of Jacob Van Hinte” belongs to “The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America (HSRCA)”
Paperback, 210 pages, extensive notes, index, illustrated
USD 21.95 / CAD 21.95