A life devoted to emigration

Professor Dr. Leo Schelbert has passed away.

At the end of March 2022, Leo Schelbert, historian and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, passed away in Evanston, Illinois, at the age of 93. Born in 1929 in Kaltbrunn, St. Gallen, the fourth of 11 children, he received his doctorate at Columbia University, New York, in 1966. He was a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from 1971 to 2003. His ceaseless and wide-ranging research into the history of Swiss emigration worldwide inspired the notion that Switzerland should seriously consider establishing a Fifth Switzerland, with its more than 800,000 members, as a kind of 27^th canton. Although Schelbert taught and lived in the United States for more than half his life, he never became a citizen of the United States. Devoted to the broad field of Swiss emigration history, he pursued an unconventional path in the course of his research, seeking out the voices of ordinary citizens in personal testimonies, letters, diaries and travel reports. He did not start with a theory and seek to prove it but, with his inimitable, open-minded spirit, sought to take inspiration from the individual and the particular to arrive at possible but never dogmatic theories. He gave unstintingly of his time as an indispensable mentor to countless students of history.

Leo Schelbert was an innovative historian who always worked from multiple perspectives. His pioneering achievements long preceded the postcolonial research that has gradually acquired traction in Switzerland over the past ten years. Half a century ago, he was already doing research into the profitable involvement of the Swiss abroad in colonial systems all over the world—in missions, in trade or in soldiering.

He also showed a profound interest in the destiny and world views of indigenous nations, recognizing that the construction of the New World in the USA by settlers from Europe was inevitably intertwined with the destruction of the indigenous people, so often excluded from the memory and historiography of the dominant society.

For many years, Leo Schelbert was the president of the Swiss American Historical Society (SAHS), editor both of the SAHS review and of the extensive SAHS book series, thus contributing significantly to the mutual understanding between two different and yet related cultures. In 2006, he was named "Auslandschweizer des Jahres" by the FDP-Switzerland (The Liberals), and in 2015, his former students at the University of Illinois History Department honored him with a Festschrift. Schelbert published widely, always aiming to reach not only academia but the public at large. His numerous publications include America experienced: 18^th and 19^th century accounts of Swiss immigrants to the United States, 1996; Emigrant Paths: Encounters with 20^th-Century Swiss Americans (co-authored with Susann Bosshard-Kaelin), 2013; and Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 2014. He also translated Manuel Menrath, Mission Sitting Bull: The Cultural Conquest of the Sioux and Their Varied Response from German to English, 2017 and shortly before he died, F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physik. Vom Westlichen und Nordindianischen Weltverständnis from English to German, unpublished. He will be sorely missed. He is survived by his wife and four children with families in the United States and by a brother in Switzerland.