Daring Dreams of the Future: Slovenian Mass Migrations 1870-1945 - Hardcover

by Aleksej Kalc (Author), Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik (Author), Janja Zitnik Serafin (Author)

In the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, nearly one-third of the population of today's Slovenia permanently settled in countries around the world. Many more were traveling back and forth, searching for work to ensure the survival of the family members left behind at home and the prosperity for the families and communities they were creating abroad.

From one of the smallest nations in Europe, barely reaching one and a half million inhabitants at the time, people departed in numbers reaching 440,000. This book tells their stories about the "daring dreams of the future," as the Slovenian poet Oton Zupancˇicˇ-whose words open the book-so beautifully put it. The people who left took recipes for their foods, accordions for their music, and love for their culture and language, which was, and has remained, a linguistic island between Vienna and Venice. In their new communities, they built homes, churches, and cultural institutions that have survived until today.

Author Biography

Aleksej Kalc is a researcher at the Slovenian Migration Institute of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a professor at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska. His research interests include social, cultural, and political history, with the main emphasis on migration and population studies, urban history, and border regions.

Mirjam Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik is a researcher at the Slovenian Migration Institute of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a professor at the University of Nova Gorica. Her research interests include human rights and migrant integration, gender inequalities, and women migrants, as well as interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies, ranging from oral history to analyses of correspondence and auto/biographic texts.

Janja Zitnik Serafin is a retired researcher of the Slovenian Migration Institute of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her main research interests include Slovenian emigration, immigration to Slovenia, and the history of Slovenian emigrant/immigrant literature and culture.