It wasn't so long time ago -- but things were different then.

People who begin anew — in a new place or a new social world — don’t start with a ‘clean slate’. They bring a lot of baggage with them. The new adventure is mixed with the old inheritance yielding results that can puzzle and surprise everyone concerned. Beginning Anew illustrates this truth with the story of the author’s immigrant family in the post World War II era as its members navigate their new American environment and meditate on their old Dutch and Calvinist world. It is a granular story of immigration, but with a twist; a coming of age story in Minnesota both poignant and realistic; and an account of the author’s education and the beginnings of an academic career in a past time of hope and possibility. This is a family story and personal memoir but it also confronts memory with the rigor of history, to recover the pain and promise of the war and post-war years, the opportunities and constraints of a boyhood in Minnesota, and the exhilarations and challenges of acquiring an Ivy League education in the 1960s. Written with warmth and candor, Beginning Anew is an account of what one leaves behind and what one carries with one; of ancestral heritage and of new beginnings, of attempting to becoming an American on one’s own terms.

Jan de Vries is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and Economics Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley where he served as Vice Provost. He is the author of numerous books and articles in economic history, including The Industrious Revolution and The Price of Bread, both published by Cambridge University Press. He is the recipient of the Heineken Prize in History. Jan de Vries was born in Ouder-Amstel, the Netherlands and raised in Deephaven and Hopkins, Minnesota. He is married with two children and two grandchildren and resides in Berkeley, California.