Leo Schelbert died in the USA at the age of 93

Leo Schelbert was an exception among Swiss historians. Like probably no other representative of the guild, he made the broad field of Swiss emigration history and thus the worldwide presence of the Swiss into his life and research work. He was firmly convinced that official Switzerland should perceive the Fifth Switzerland with its more than 776,000 members as a kind of 27th canton.

With his research work, Leo Schelbert followed a special path throughout his life. For him, the personal certificates, letters, diaries and travel reports of the emigrants were central. He did not start from theory, but from the individual destiny, from the particular of the individual story, which for him always referred to the general. He formulated his research results in such a way that they were understood beyond the circle of experts – in both German and English.

Leo Schelbert was born in 1929 as the fourth of eleven children in Kaltbrunn in St. Gallen. He first worked as a high school teacher before going to Columbia University in New York to study American history with a concentration in immigration. After receiving his doctorate, he taught from 1963 to 1969 at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. After two years of research in Switzerland, he accepted a call to the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1971.

In the USA, he gained a reputation as an innovative historian who always focused on global phenomena and worked from multiple perspectives. In view of the postcolonial research that has been established in Switzerland for a good ten years, his works must be regarded as pioneering achievements. Half a century ago, he already pursued similar approaches. He worked out that people from Switzerland were involved in missions, in trade or in the payroll system in many parts of the world and benefited from colonial systems.

It was always important to him to include the fate and world views of indigenous nations and to take their historical experiences seriously. In his publications, he countered the construction of the New World in the USA by settlers from Europe with the destruction of the Indian worlds, which was often ignored in the historiography of the culture of remembrance of the dominant society.

Leo Schelbert was involved for many years as President of the Swiss American Historical Society (SAHS), as editor of the “SAHS Review” and publisher of the extensive SAHS book series and has thus made a significant contribution to mutual understanding between two different, yet related cultures. He was the author and publisher of numerous books such as “Everything is very different here. Swiss Emigration Reports of the 18th and 19th Century in the Territory of Today’s United States», «From Switzerland Elsewhere. Historical sketch of a nation’s global presence”, “Historical Dictionary of Switzerland” and co-author of “Nach America. Life accounts of Swiss emigrants».

Leo Schelbert lived and taught in the USA for more than half of his life. However, he did not apply for naturalization. In 2006 he was voted “Swiss Abroad of the Year” by the FDP Switzerland. Nevertheless, he never saw himself as a “Swiss Abroad”, but as a Swiss working abroad. At the end of March 2022, Leo Schelbert died in the USA at the age of 93. He leaves behind his wife and four children with families in the USA.