Prof. Anna Andrzejewski and PhD candidate Travis Olson will be presenting their research in a live virtual lecture entitled: “Folk Farmsteads on the Frontier: German-American Farm Buildings in Southwestern North Dakota” on Thursday, January 28th at 6:00pm (CST). The lecture is hosted by the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at UW-Madison.
The talk will focus on farm buildings built by German-Americans who immigrated from Russia, Hungary, and other parts of eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Stark and Hettinger Counties in southwestern North Dakota. As part of several field schools and grant-funded projects, faculty and students from UW have been working with local partners since 2017 to document the history of these buildings through measured drawings, archival research, and oral histories and interviews. Previous research on German-American farmsteads in the Great Plains has focused on finding evidence of “Old World” survivals. In contrast, our work examines how “Old World” ideas mixed among and between different immigrant groups as well as how it changed over the first generations of settlement.
The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Visit https://mki.wisc.edu/event/live-virtual-lecture-folk-farmsteads-on-the-frontier/ for more information and email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to register for the event.