Speaking Event

Monday April 29 @ 6 PM- Dr. Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik

Dr. Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, co-author of Daring Dreams of the Future: Slovenian Mass Migrations 1890-1945 now published in English, is a leading researcher of Slovenian-Americans and their achievements. Dr. Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, is traveling the U.S. discussing how nearly half a million Slovenians left their homeland to build new lives. The United States has the highest concentrations of Slovenians outside of Europe. 

Daring Dreams of the Future: Slovenian Mass Migrations 1890-1945

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 Župancˇicˇ―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.