The Americanist Blog

American Studies graduate Queeny van der Spek has won the 2019 Theodore Roosevelt American History Award (TRAHA). The prize was awarded at the Netherlands American Studies Association’s Amerikanistendag, in Groningen on June 7. The TRAHA winner receives, among other things, a trip to Teddy Roosevelt’s old ranching grounds of North Dakota.

Van der Spek’s thesis, “Hitler’s Gift to America: American motivations to rescue displaced scientists from Europe in the 1930s,” is an account of the actions undertaken by governments, universities, and philanthropic organizations in the United States to aid scientists from Nazi-dominated Europe. She wound together the history of immigration and refugee policy with the history of science. As the jury noted in its report, the thesis “scrupulously explores the reasons underlying American national interest in rescuing displaced European scientists and offers fresh insights into the story of American interwar refugee policies.” Van der Spek “makes a substantial contribution to the existing debate about US’s responsibilities over the fate of European Jews and pinpoints the correlation between science and politics, which rests at the center of her intellectually engaging and historically revealing analysis.”

The TRAHA jury also gave special honorary mention to American Studies graduate Lennart Bolwijn, for his thesis, “Dogma, Romance, and Double-Consciousness: The Dilemmas of the New Negro Generation Through the Travels of Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay.” Bolwijn followed the Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay and the Suriname-born political activist Otto Huiswoud through Harlem, Jamaica, Suriname, and Moscow, and traced the surprising intellectual orbits of the Harlem Renaissance, black nationalism, and communism. The jury noted the thesis’s “surprisingly large terrain,” and its laudable use of primary sources from the Black Archives in Amsterdam.

Both theses are to be applauded for their ambitious international scope and their archival detail. Queeny and Lennart have done the program proud.

Other recent graduates of the American Studies MA program who have won the award are Renee de Groot (2017) and Martina van Cimmenaede (2016). The prize jury has also given honorable mentions to graduates Roos Maier (2016) and Elisabeth Koning (2014).

The full jury report can be read here.

The forthcoming Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis features an excellent article from the historian Elisabeth Koning, an alum of the MA program in American Studies, which draws on the work begun in her thesis. Koning excavated Dutch translations and adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and developed a profound yet nuanced argument about the diffusion of American popular culture. She has extended and refined that research here.

Zwarte Piet, een blackfacepersonage: een eeuw aan blackfacevermaak in Nederland [Black Pete, a blackface character: a century of blackface amusement in the Netherlands]

Abstract: In 1847 the Ethiopian Serenaders successfully introduced American blackface minstrelsy to a Dutch public. A few years later the publication of the Dutch translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) and the subsequent ‘Tom-play’ led white Dutch actors to perform in blackface. Blackface performances functioned not merely as entertainment, but perpetuated a stereotypical white image of black people. During that same period the Amsterdam-based teacher Jan Schenkman published a children’s book including a black servant (St. Nikolaas en zijn knecht, 1850). The servant was known as Black Pete and became established in the Saint Nicolas tradition. In the years to come, Black Pete, generally a white person wearing a blackface mask, leaned heavily on the same elements that made the blackface minstrel dandy type a success: edified clothing, a blackface mask, and antiemancipation humour.

Zwarte Piet en de blackfacetraditie [in Dutch]