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Summary
Summary
In this unique longitudinal study of how a divided people relate to one another, H. Arnold Barton outlines dilemmas created by the great migration of Swedes to the United States from 1840 through 1940 and the complex love-hate relationship that resulted between those who stayed and those who left. During that hundred-year period, one Swede out of five voluntarily immigrated to the United States, and four-fifths of those immigrants remained in their new country. This study seeks to explore the far-reaching implications of this mass migration for both Swedes and Swedish Americans.
The Swedes were a literate, historically aware people, and the 1.2 million Swedes who immigrated to the United States offer a particularly well-documented and illuminating case study. Barton has skillfully woven into the text translations of little known published and unpublished Swedish sources from both sides of the Atlantic, to embody--in haunting human terms--both what was gained and what was lost through emigration.
Past studies have traditionally shown ethnic mobilization to be a defensive reaction against the exclusive nativism of resident Americans. Barton convincingly demonstrates, however, that the creation of a distinctive Swedish-American identity was at least equally an expression of the immigrants' need to justify leaving their homeland to their former compatriots and to themselves by asserting a rightful and unique place within the Swedish national community. He concludes that the relationship between Swedes and Swedish Americans was essentially similar to that experienced by other peoples divided by migration, and that the long debate over the United States and emigration at its deepest level reveals both hopes and fears most conspicuously symbolized by America and "Americanization" in an increasingly integrated world undergoing the relentless advance of modernization.
Author Notes
H. Arnold Barton, professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, is the author of The Search for Ancestors: A Swedish-American Family Saga, and Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 1760-1815.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
Written by the contemporary "dean" of Swedish immigration history in the US, this work is impeccably researched, lucidly and even eloquently narrated, and is a unique contribution to the scholarly literature of American ethnic groups. Barton's pioneering study examines carefully how a people of common heritage were divided by the process of emigration, and how the Swedes of the homeland and Swedish Americans came to regard each other over a century of time. This scholarly work is not only of interest to Americans of Swedish ancestry but also serves as a useful model for similar studies that could be undertaken in regard to the many other European ethnic groups that participated in the mass migration to the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates and above and to public libraries with Scandinavian American patrons. K. Smemo; Moorhead State University
Table of Contents
Preface | p. xi |
Part 1 p. 1 | |
1 Prologue Before the Great Migration | p. 5 |
2 The Flow Begins 1840-1865 | p. 13 |
3 A New Sweden Across the Sea | p. 37 |
4 A Group Portrait For Those at Home | p. 44 |
5 The Creation of A Swedish American Identity | p. 59 |
6 What Was Sweden to Do? | p. 71 |
7 Changing Signals | p. 80 |
8 Visitations And Counter-Visitations | p. 90 |
9 Swedish America Self-Appraised | p. 114 |
Part 2 p. 129 | |
10 The Homeland Faces Its Emigration Crisis | p. 133 |
11 The Search For Answers | p. 147 |
12 The Anti-Emigration Movement | p. 166 |
13 Transatlantic Visions and Images | p. 179 |
14 Visitors To Alien Shores | p. 187 |
15 The Heyday Of Swedish America | p. 210 |
Part 3 p. 239 | |
16 Swedish America At the Divide | p. 245 |
18 Travelers From Afar | p. 283 |
19 The Afterglow | p. 302 |
20 Epilogue | p. 329 |
Appendix 1 Annual Emigration from and Remigration To Sweden, 1851-1940 | p. 343 |
Appendix 2 A Note on Swedish Regions And Their Inhabitants | p. 347 |
Appendix 3 p. 348 | |
Notes | p. 349 |
An Essay on Sources | p. 388 |
Index | p. 393 |