The unofficial online home for fans of the Western Michigan University Broncos. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moQiXZO6R1A

At first I thought you were referring to Michigan City.

Nice.

Surprised they failed to mention that GR is also home to the CRC. When I lived there 20 years ago those folks thought they were the center of the universe. Heading back there in August for a few days and will be interested in how things have changed.

You know, I hate to say it, but every time I return to GR, it seems not much has changed. Maybe that's because I spend most of my time off the Plainfield Ave corridor, where my parents live.

(06-03-2013 12:42 PM)chipfan Wrote:  Surprised they failed to mention that GR is also home to the CRC. When I lived there 20 years ago those folks thought they were the center of the universe. Heading back there in August for a few days and will be interested in how things have changed.

You'll find not much has changed.

About 10 years ago there was a historian at WMU (Larry Ten Harmsel) who published a number of short books covering the various immigrant groups who settled Michigan. One was on the Dutch.

He said that most immigrant groups came to the US for either economic reasons or to escape religious persecution in Europe. The Dutch were the exception. They came to America to escape the growing religious freedom and tolerance in the Netherlands.

Sort of explains the intolerance and insular living practiced by the Dutch in west Michigan today. Interesting tidbit from the book. Hendrick Meijer founded his grocery chain in Greenville, versus Holland or Grand Rapids, because he could not stand the overly pious Dutch living there.

Funny I didn't know GR was on the lake shore

Also reading the review of his book on the Dutch on Amazon leads me to conclude it is highly flawed.
http://www.amazon.com/Dutch-Michigan-Dis...575&sr=1-2

I read the book and thought he hit the nail on the head, having grown up with the culture. What do you think is inaccurate about it?

^
Oh that might be a tough one for you Tommyboy!

Might help to actually read the book as opposed to just a review of it.

Flawed as in Incomplete. The main body of the book is only 28 pages long, and the writer of the review points out significant omissions:

Quote:Nothing is said about the Michigan Dutch-American publishers such as Baker Book House, Eerdmans, Kregel and Zondervan. Omissions are also found in the author's remarks about novelists who have written about the Dutch in Michigan. David Cornel De Jong is mentioned, but absent from the text are works on the Dutch by Arnold Mulder and Bastian Kruithof's Instead of the Thorn. Nor does Ron Jager's Eighty Acres appear here. A line or two in the text are devoted to Feike Feikema and Peter De Vries, both Calvin College graduates. Of Feikema's works, only The Primitive gives the Michigan Dutch a significant presence and De Vries has little to say about the Michigan Dutch in The Blood of the Lamb or anywhere else in his fiction. In short, the author's consideration of De Vries and Feikema at the expense of writers who, like David Cornel De Jong, wrote specifically about the Michigan Dutch, is both puzzling and open to question.

So he bases his work on a few minor writers but fails to include others who are far more prolific.

Quote:Even within the Grand Rapids-Holland area, significant elements are not included. There is nothing on Dutch furniture workers and truck gardening, the two largest areas of employment. Overlooked also is the 1911 furniture strike in Grand Rapids, which illuminates the Grand Rapids Dutch community under stress. Shared worker grievances and clerical opinions about the right to strike say much about the religious-economic environment of the Grand Rapids Dutch, but not in this work. A section is devoted to logging, yet this was not a major economic enterprise for the Dutch in Holland or Grand Rapids

And leaves out two major economic drivers in the region to this day, to focus on an relatively minor economic enterprise among the focus group.

And this bit:

Quote: Although the causes for Dutch migration to America over the past century-and-a-half are complex, this work presents this harsh oversimplification:

One could say that the people who led boatloads of Hollanders to Michigan were among the few American immigrants to flee a spirit of tolerance in their native land. (p. 3)

In point of fact, many of these early immigrants had been arrested, fined and imprisoned in the Netherlands because of their religious convictions and were not allowed to operate their own schools.

People were so tolerant they threw others in jail for their religious beliefs, sounds like they were escaping religious persecution like many other groups.

As I said, highly flawed. That Harmsel fails to mention the development of two major economic drivers for the region to this day is nigh-unforgivable, combined with other omissions...

I never knew the part about schools in the Netherlands.

That puts a new perspective on the strong support of Christian schools and maybe the general negativism about public education.

Interesting.

(06-03-2013 11:00 PM)Broncobelt Wrote:  Might help to actually read the book as opposed to just a review of it.

Cliff's Notes culture. Quick to dismiss based on the superficial dismissing by others, much easier that way. Think, "talk radio".

I would hardly call Baker Book House, Eerdmans or Kregel major institutions. Just small businesses like every region has.

As far as authors, every one has there own interpretation as to who the important literary contributors are.