H.B. Simonsen Interviews
This collection includes a set of interviews with Danish Americans associated with Grundtvigian organizations and events in the United States. The interviewer was Henrik Bredmose Simonsen, a Danish historian, who has worked with Danish American church history since the 1980s. His research resulted in the book: Kampen om danskheden: tro og nationalitet i de danske kirkesamfund i Amerika (The Struggle for Danishness: Faith and Nationality in the Danish Church Communities in America), published by the University of Aarhus in 1990. The interviews would appeal to those with an interest in the lives of immigrants in rural communities in the American Midwest during the 20th century. Of course, they will be more interesting to people with a Danish background, especially to those connected to, or curious about, the so-called Grundtvigians and their institutions and traditions in the United States.
The interviews were made during August and September of 2010 in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. (See below for list of participants and places). The interviews were made in connection with Simonsen’s research for an exhibition at Museum Skanderborg. The exhibition was entitled Grundtvig på prærien – danske indvandrermiljøer i USA (Grundtvig on the Prairie – Danish Immigrant Communities in the USA). It opened in May of 2013 at Museum Skanderborg and was later exhibited at five other museums in Denmark. An American version of the exhibition was made in collaboration with the Danish Immigrant Museum (now Museum of Danish America) in Elk Horn, Iowa. It opened in 2015 with the title Happy Danes on the Plains.
The original recordings of the interviews are held by Dr. Simonsen. He has generously provided digitized versions to the Danish American Archive & Library with the intent of making these voices readily available to anyone with an interest in the subject.
Draft transcripts of the interviews were machine-generated by DAAL in 2024. In 2024 and 2025 Dr. Simonsen graciously reviewed and corrected the text of the transcripts. Users are still strongly encouraged to compare the transcript with the audio recording if their work requires fully accurate speaker identification.
The draft transcripts were generated using WhisperX (version 3.1). Subsequent review and editing was accomplished (in part) using the ELAN (various versions) annotation software (Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan).
Audio files with transcriptions