Dutch-Protestant Immigration to the Americas Online
The Stallinga-Ganzevoort Collection, 1890-1960
This collection documents the activities of the Stichting Landverhuizing Nederland (SLN) in Brazil, the US, and (predominantly) Canada. Much of the material comes from the Canadian offices of the SLN, which was established in 1931 and remained open till the late 1950s with the purpose of selecting and assisting Dutch emigrants. Before the body of original documents was destroyed, the Canadian scholar Herman Ganzevoort had it microfilmed with the support of Gerrit Stallinga.
The collection contains correspondence, reports, lists, and pamphlets regarding Dutch immigration to the Americas (mostly in English), as well as correspondence from and about individual immigrants’ experiences (mostly in Dutch).
As with the van Stekelenburg collection, these documents illuminate the complex history of Dutch emigration, expanding traditional narratives chronologically, thematically, and spatially. In particular, the Stallinga-Ganzevoort collection focuses on the lives and choices of emigrants belonging to different Christian denominations (predominantly Protestant) and clarifies the importance of the continuous educational campaigns that Dutch churches were carrying on at home with the aim of training those professional figures whose expertise was needed on the other side of the Atlantic.
At the same time, this collection provides information about Dutch emigrants who decided to settle in such countries as Brazil. In this particular setting, Dutch people encountered different and partly novel problems and could not always rely on pre-existing national networks or communities. For this reason, the collection is especially appealing to those scholars who study global migrations, transnational identities, and cross-cultural exchanges.
Project Adviser Dario Fazzi,
Roosevelt Institute for American Studies
Scholars and students of cultural and public diplomacy, political and economic relations, migration flows, cross-cultural exchanges, the role of religion in foreign policy making, and American political, cultural, and economic hegemony in Europe.
Project adviser
Dario Fazzi is Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies. His main field of study is US and Cold War history, with a particular focus on public diplomacy and transnational movements. His works and reviews on nuclear cultures, peace movements, youth protests, and transatlantic crossings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, international collections, and edited volumes. He is the author of
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Anti-Nuclear Movement: The Voice of Conscience, a systematic account of the former first lady and UN representative’s involvement in the first ban-the-bomb campaign of the Cold War. Dr. Fazzi teaches history courses at several Dutch universities, where he lectures on the US, the Cold War, and transatlantic relations. He is also project assistant for Leiden University’s Massive Open Online Course
The Rooseveltian Century(Coursera).