Papers by Endre Szentkiralyi
Hungarian Cultural Studies
Hungarian Cultural Studies
In early 1914, a young Hungarian minister arrived in Pittsburgh for what would have been a two-ye... more In early 1914, a young Hungarian minister arrived in Pittsburgh for what would have been a two-year stint as assistant pastor, and he was surprised to find Lajos Kossuth had already visited that city with the three rivers. The name of this twenty-six-year old minister was Ödön Vasváry (1888-1977), and he found it kind of a shame that no one in Hungary really knew about this legacy, so he thought he would collect some newspaper clippings, photos, and drawings about Kossuth's earlier visit. Thus began Vasváry's lifelong collection of all things about or related to Hungarians in America. The First World War kept him from returning to Hungary. Then he married, served as a minister to Hungarian congregations in Buffalo and Cleveland, and finally he moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the Hungarian Reformed Federation, while also researching in the Library of Congress and constantly adding to his personal collection. In 1978 the Vasváry family donated his entire library and collection, amassed over a lifetime of Hungarian American research, to the Somogyi library of Szeged in Hungary. Broad and deep in its holdings, the collection includes material about Kossuth's American tour, material about Mihály Kováts, the father of the American Cavalry of 1776, material about Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty's United States visit, as well as extensive material about the Holy Crown of Hungary and its American journey. Its well-organized database includes 436 cards with Vasváry's handwritten notes, clippings, photos, and manuscripts. The book collection has rare U.S. editions from the nineteenth century, as well as yearbooks, almanacs, and literature. The collection's card catalog has around 20,000 entries, with biographical and bibliographical information, all meticulously organized. The collection also includes 3,000 typed pages of articles written by Vasváry in the course of his research. Easily found online is the Vasváry Collection Newsletter, published twice yearly since 1989, with archived issues from 2003 until the present day, and a very useful ninety-three-paged PDF-file index spanning 1989 to 2013. So let us examine a recent edition of the Vasváry Collection Newsletter, published in June of 2021. The newsletter contains five articles with material that may never see the light of day in the English-speaking arena, unless the reader happens to be also fluent in the Hungarian language. The authors of these articles are first-rate scholars, known in Hungarian American academic circles with solid reputations, and their topics vary, but each one in its own right is a substantial work of research.
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Papers by Endre Szentkiralyi