User:Bishonen/sandbox America

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Poster showing a cross-section of the Cunard Line's emigrant liner RMS Aquitania, launched in 1913.

During the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden for the United States of America. While the virgin land of the open U.S. frontier was a magnet for the rural poor all over Europe, some factors encouraged Swedish emigration in particular. The religious repression of the Swedish Lutheran State Church was widely resented, as was the social conservatism and class snobbery of the Swedish monarchy. Population growth and crop failures were also making conditions in the Swedish countryside increasingly bleak around the middle of the 19th century. By contrast, reports from early Swedish emigrants praised American religious and political freedom and undreamed-of opportunities to better one's condition. They painted the American Midwest as an earthly paradise of free, ample, and fertile land.

Swedish migration to the United States peaked in the decades after the American Civil War (1861–65). By 1890 the U.S. census reported a Swedish American population of nearly 800,000. Most of them became classic pioneers, clearing and cultivating the prairie. Other forces pushed the new immigrants towards the cities, particularly Chicago. Single young women usually went straight from agricultural work in the Swedish countryside to jobs as housemaids in American towns, where they found employment easily and learned the language and customs quickly.

Many established Swedish Americans visited the Old Country in the later 19th century, their narratives illustrating the difference in customs and manners. Some made the journey with the intention of returning to their homeland, but changed their minds when faced with what they thought an arrogant aristocracy, a coarse and degraded laboring class, and a superficial religious life. The trait most shocking to the returning travellers was Swedish society's lack of respect for women.

Swedish emigration fell in the 1890s as the open frontier of the West, with its powerful pull on landless agricultural workers, reached the Pacific Ocean and ceased to exist. However, emigration rose again with the new century, giving rise to national alarm and a Parliamentary Commission. The Commission recommended social and economic reform for "bringing the best sides of America to Sweden," and its major proposals were rapidly implemented: universal male suffrage, better housing, general economic development, and a broader popular education. A year after the Commission published its last volume, World War I broke out and reduced emigration to a mere trickle. From the 1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration.

[edit] 17th century: New Sweden

Main article: New Sweden

The Swedish West India Company established a colony on the Delaware River in 1638, naming it New Sweden. It was the smallest and shortest-lived of the European colonial empires, containing at its height only some 600 Swedish and Finnish settlers (Finland being then part of Sweden). It was lost to the Dutch in New Netherland in 1655. Nevertheless, the descendants of the original colonists maintained their Swedish speech until the late 18th century.

The historian H. A. Barton has suggested that the greatest significance of New Sweden was the strong and long-lasting interest in America that the colony generated in Sweden.^[1] America was seen as the standard-bearer of enlightenment and freedom, and became the ideal of liberal Swedes. Their admiration for America was combined with the notion of a past Swedish Golden Age, whose ancient Nordic ideals had supposedly been corrupted by foreign influences. Recovering the purity of these timeless values in the New World was a fundamental theme of Swedish, and later Swedish-American, discussion of America. Since the imaginary Swedish Golden Age answered to shifting needs and ideals, the "timeless values" varied over time, and so did the Swedish idea of the New World. In the 17th and 18th centuries, America symbolized the rights of conscience and religious freedom. In the political turmoil of 19th-century Europe, many citizens of the hierarchic Swedish class society looked with admiration to the American republican government and to the American respect for honest toil. In the early 20th century, the Swedish-American dream even embraced the welfare-state ideal of a society responsible for the well-being of all its citizens. By contrast, the United States became later in the 20th century the symbol and dream of unfettered individualism.

Swedish debate about America remained mostly theoretical before the 19th century, since very few Swedes had any personal experience to draw on. Emigration was illegal; population was considered the wealth of nations.^[2] The Swedish population doubled between 1750 and 1850,^[3] and as population growth outstripped economic development, it gave rise to fears of overpopulation based on the influential population theory of Thomas Malthus. In the 1830s, the laws against emigration were repealed.^[4]

[edit] 19th century

[edit] European mass emigration: push and pull

Large-scale European emigration to the United States started in the 19th century in the British Isles and Germany, followed by a rising wave after 1850 from most Northern European countries, followed in turn by Central and Southern Europe.^[5] Research into the forces behind this European mass emigration has relied on sophisticated statistical methods.^[6] One theory which has gained wide acceptance is H. Jerome's analysis in 1926 of the "push and pull" factors—the impulses to emigration generated by conditions in Europe and the U.S. respectively. Jerome found that fluctuations in emigration co-varied more with economic developments in the U.S. than in Europe, and deduced that the pull was stronger than the push.^[7] Jerome's conclusions have been challenged, but still form the basis of much work on the subject.^[8]

Emigration patterns in the Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—show some striking variations within the group. Nordic mass emigration started in Norway, which also retained the highest rate throughout the century. Sweden got underway in the early 1840s, and had the third-highest rate in all of Europe, after Ireland and Norway. Denmark had a low and undramatic emigration, while Iceland had a late start but soon reached levels comparable to Norway. Finland, whose mass emigration didn't start until the late 1880s, belonged to the East European wave.

[edit] Crossing the Atlantic

The first European emigrants travelled in the holds of sailing cargo ships. With the age of steam, an efficient transatlantic passenger transport mechanism was built up at the end of the 1860s. It was based on huge, dedicated emigrant ocean liners run by international shipping lines, most prominently the Cunard, White Star, and Inman lines. An important precondition for Swedish emigration was the comparatively early creation of a railway network adequate to bring the inland population to the port towns of Stockholm, Malmö, and Gothenburg. From there, many shipping lines operated various routes, some of them with complex early stages and consequently a long and trying journey on the road and at sea. Thus North German transport agencies relied on the regular Stockholm–Lübeck steamship service to bring Swedish emigrants to Lübeck, and from there on German train services to take them to Hamburg or Bremen. There they would board ships to the British ports of Southampton and Liverpool and change to one of the great transatlantic liners bound for New York. The majority of Swedish emigrants, however, travelled from Gothenburg to Hull, UK, on dedicated boats run by the Wilson Line, then by train across Britain to Liverpool and the big ships.^[9]

During the later 19th century, the big shipping lines financed Swedish emigrant agents and paid for the production of large quantities of emigration propaganda. Much of this promotional material, such as leaflets, was produced by immigration promoters in the U.S. The material emphasized the comforts and advantages of the particular line paying for it, and gave some space to general advice for prospective emigrants. Descriptions of American conditions were brief and hardly idealized. Newspaper advertising was very common, but tended to be repetitive and stereotyped in content.^[10]

The conservative Swedish ruling class disapproved strongly of emigration and blamed it on the propaganda and price-cutting of the shipping line agents. Modern historians have varying views about the real importance of these factors. Brattne and Åkerman have examined the ticket prices and the advertising campaigns as a possible third force between "push" and "pull". They conclude that neither the pro-emigration propaganda nor the pricing policies of the transoceanic steamship companies had any decisive influence on Swedish emigration. While the companies remain unwilling, as of 2007, to open their archives to researchers, the limited sources available suggest, according to Brattne and Åkerman, that ticket prices did drop in the 1880s, but remained on average artificially high because of cartels and price-fixing.^[11] By contrast, H. A. Barton states that the cost of crossing the Atlantic dropped drastically between 1865 and 1890, impelling poorer Swedes to emigrate.^[12]

[edit] Mid-19th century

The Emigrants by S. V. Helander (1839–1901): a young farmer takes a sober farewell of friends and relatives.

Swedish mass migration took off in the spring of 1841 with the departure of Uppsala University graduate Gustaf Unonius (1810–1902) together with his wife, a maid, and two students. This small group founded a settlement they named New Upsala at Pine Lake, Wisconsin, and began to clear the wilderness, full of enthusiasm for frontier life in "one of the most beautiful valleys the world can offer."^[13] After moving to Chicago, Unonius soon became disillusioned with life in the U.S., but his reports in praise of the simple and virtuous pioneer life, published in the liberal newspaper Aftonbladet, had already begun to draw Swedes westward.

The rising Swedish exodus was caused by economic, political, and religious conditions affecting particularly the rural population. Europe was in the grip of an economic depression. In Sweden, population growth and repeated crop failures were making it increasingly difficult to wrest a living from the tiny, fragmented land plots on which at least three quarters of the inhabitants depended. Rural conditions were especially bleak in the stony and unforgiving Småland province, which became the heartland of emigration. The complete agricultural contrast to Småland was the American Midwest, which, wrote Unonius in 1842, "more closely than any other country in the world approaches the ideal which nature seems to have intended for the happiness and comfort of humanity."^[14] Prairie land in the Midwest was ample, loamy, and government-owned. From 1841 it was sold to squatters for $1.25 per acre, following the Preemption Act of 1841 (later replaced by the Homestead Act). The inexpensive and fertile land of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin was irresistibly beguiling to landless and impoverished European peasants, and it also attracted more well-established farmers.

The political freedom of the American republic exerted a similar pull. Swedish peasants were some of the most literate in Europe, and consequently receptive to the egalitarian and radical ideas that shook Europe in the 1840s.^[15] The clash between Swedish liberalism and a repressive monarchist regime raised political awareness among the disadvantaged, who looked to the U.S. to realize their republican ideals.

Swedish anti-emigration propaganda, representing Per Svensson's dream of the American idyll (left) and the reality of Per's life in the wilderness (right), where he is menaced by a mountain lion, a big snake, and wild Indians, seen scalping and disembowelling a man.^[16]

Swedes widely resented the religious repression practised by the Lutheran State Church. Such conflicts were most explosive in the countryside, where dissenting pietist groups were more active, and were more directly under the eye of local law enforcement and the parish priest. Official clampdowns on illegal forms of worship and teaching were often the decisive factor in making whole groups of pietists leave together, intent on forming their own spiritual communities in the new land. The largest contingent of such dissenters, 1,500 followers of Eric Jansson, left in the late 1840s and founded a community in Bishop Hill, Illinois.

The first Swedish emigrant guidebook was published as early as 1841, the year Unonius left, and nine handbooks were published between 1849 and 1855.^[17] Substantial groups of lumberjacks and iron miners were recruited directly by company agents in Sweden. Agents recruiting construction builders for American railroads also appeared, the first in 1854, scouting for the Illinois Central Railroad.^[18]

The Swedish establishment disapproved intensely of emigration. Seen as depleting the labor force and as a defiant act among the lower orders, emigration alarmed both the spiritual and the worldly authorities. Many emigrant diaries and memoirs feature an emblematic early scene in which the local clergy warns the travellers against risking their souls among foreign heresies. The conservative press described emigrants as lacking in patriotism and moral fibre: "No workers are more lazy, immoral and indifferent than those who emigrate to other places."^[19] Emigration was denounced as an unreasoning "mania" or "craze", planted on an ignorant populace by "outside agents." The liberal press retorted that the "lackeys of monarchism" failed to take into account the miserable conditions in the Swedish countryside and the backwardness of Swedish economic and political institutions.^[20] "Yes, emigration is indeed a 'mania'", wrote the liberal Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning sarcastically, "The mania of wanting to eat one's fill after one has worked oneself hungry! The craze of wanting to support oneself and one's family in an honest manner!"^[21]

[edit] Late 19th century

Female laborers at a late-19th-century Swedish sugar beet plantation. Sugar production remained non-mechanized and labor-intensive with low wages throughout the 19th century, fuelling the workers' dream of American opportunity and modern agricultural machinery.

Steam-driven threshing machine near Hallock, Minnesota, 1882.

Swedish immigration to North America reached its height in the decades immediately after the American Civil War (1861–65). The size of the Swedish-American community in 1865 is estimated at 25,000 people, a figure that was soon to be surpassed by the yearly Swedish immigration. By 1890 the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000, with emigration peaking in 1869 and again in 1887.^[22] Almost all of this great influx settled in the North. The great majority of them had been peasants in the old country, pushed away from Sweden by disastrous crop failures^[23] and pulled towards North America by the cheap land resulting from the 1862 Homestead Act. Most of them became classic pioneers, clearing and cultivating the virgin land of the Midwest and extending the pre-Civil War settlements further west, into Kansas and Nebraska.^[24] Once sizable Swedish farming communities had formed on the prairie, the greatest impetus for further peasant migration came through personal contacts. The iconic "America-letter" to relatives and friends at home spoke directly from a position of trust and shared background, carrying immediate conviction. At the height of migration, familial America-letters could lead to chain reactions which would all but depopulate some Swedish parishes, dissolving tightly knit communities which then re-assembled in the Midwest.^[25]

Other forces worked to push the new immigrants towards the cities, particularly Chicago, rather than the prairie. According to H. A. Barton, the cost of crossing the Atlantic dropped by more than half during 1865–1890, which led to progressively poorer Swedes contributing a growing share of immigration (but compare Brattne and Åkerman, see "Crossing the Atlantic" above). The new immigrants were increasingly younger and unmarried. With the shift from family to individual immigration came a faster and more complete Americanization, as young, single individuals with little money took whatever jobs they could get, often in cities. Substantial numbers even of those who had been farmers in the old country made straight for American cities and towns, living and working there at least until they had saved enough capital to marry and buy farms of their own.^[26] Whether or not a prairie farm had been an immigrant's original dream, a growing proportion of immigrants stayed in urban centers, combining emigration with the flight from the countryside happening in the homeland and across Europe.^[27]

Single young women, a group Barton considers particularly significant, most commonly moved straight from field work in rural Sweden to jobs as live-in housemaids in urban America. "Literature and tradition have preserved the often tragic image of the pioneer immigrant wife and mother," writes Barton, "bearing her burden of hardship, deprivation and longing on the untamed frontier… More characteristic among the newer arrivals, however, was the young, unmarried woman… As domestic servants in America, they… were treated as members of the families they worked for and like 'ladies' by American men, who showed them a courtesy and consideration to which they were quite unaccustomed at home."^[28] They found employment easily, as Scandinavian maids were in high demand, and learned the language and customs quickly. In contrast, newly arrived Swedish men were often employed in all-Swedish work gangs. The young women usually married Swedish men, and brought with them in marriage an enthusiasm for ladylike, American manners and middle-class refinements. Many admiring remarks are recorded from the late 19th century about the sophistication and elegance that simple Swedish farm girls would gain in a few years, and about their unmistakably American demeanor.^[29]

As newcomers, the Swedes tended to be despised by the native-born, but when immigration from southern and eastern Europe increased dramatically during the 1880s, the Scandinavians looked better and better to Anglo-American eyes.^[30] Their style was more familiar: "They are not peddlers, nor organ grinders, nor beggars; they do not sell ready-made clothing nor keep pawn shops… they do not seek the shelter of the American flag merely to introduce and foster among us… socialism, nihilism, communism… they are more like Americans than are any other foreign peoples."^[31] The Scandinavians were also welcomed as counterweights to the numerous Irish immigrants, in other words for not being Catholic.^[32]

"A childhood acquaintance, much changed": the simple young Swedish peasant women's rapid growth in sophistication in North America.

Preoccupied with their identity as both Swedish and American, a number of well-established and longtime Swedish Americans visited Sweden in the 1870s. Their comments give historians a window on the cultural contrasts involved. A group from Chicago made the journey in an effort to remigrate and spend their later years in the country of their birth, but changed their minds when faced with the realities of 19th-century Swedish society. Uncomfortable with what they described as the social snobbery, pervasive drunkenness, and superficial religious life of the old country, they returned promptly to America.^[33] The most notable visitor was Hans Mattsson (1832–93), an early Minnesota settler who had served as a colonel in the Union Army and had been Minnesota's secretary of state. He visited Sweden in 1868–69 to recruit settlers on behalf of the Minnesota Immigration Board, and again in the 1870s to recruit for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Viewing Swedish class snobbery with indignation, Mattson wrote in his Reminiscences that this contrast was the key to the greatness of America: "Labor is respected, while in most other countries it is looked down upon with slight." He was sardonically amused by the ancient pageantry of monarchy at the ceremonial opening of the Riksdag: "With all respects for old Swedish customs and manners, I cannot but compare this pageant to a great American circus—minus the menagerie, of course."^[34]

Mattson's first recruiting visit came immediately after two consecutive seasons of crop failure in 1867 and 1868, and he found himself "besieged by people who wished to accompany me back to America." He noted that

the laboring and middle classes already at that time had a pretty correct idea of America, and the fate that awaited emigrants there; but the ignorance, prejudice and hatred toward America and everything pertaining to it among the aristocracy, and especially the office holders, was as unpardonable as it was ridiculous. It was claimed by them that all was humbug in America, that it was the paradise of scoundrels, cheats and rascals, and that nothing good could possibly come out of it.^[35]

A more recent American immigrant, Ernst Skarstedt, who visited Sweden in 1885, received the same galling impression of upper-class arrogance and anti-Americanism. The laboring classes, in their turn, appeared to him coarse and degraded, drinking heavily in public, speaking in a stream of curses, making obscene jokes in front of women and children. Skarstedt felt surrounded by "arrogance on one side and obsequiousness on the other, a manifest scorn for menial labor, a desire to appear to be more than one was."^[36] This traveller too was incessantly hearing American civilization and culture denigrated from the depths of upper-class Swedish prejudice. "If I, in all modesty, told something about America, it could happen that in reply I was informed that this could not possibly be so or that the matter was better understood in Sweden."

Swedish emigration dropped dramatically just before the turn of the 20th century, while remigration rose, as conditions in Sweden improved while those in the U.S. deteriorated. Sweden underwent a rapid industrialization within a few years in the 1890s, and wages rose, principally in the fields of mining, forestry, and agriculture. The "pull" from the U.S. declined even more sharply than the Swedish "push," as the frontier reached the Pacific Ocean in 1890 and ceased to exist. The price of land rose, and the U.S. was torn by monopoly capitalism and labor unrest. No longer growing but instead settling and consolidating, the Swedish-American community seemed set to become ever more American and less Swedish. The new century, however, saw a new influx.^[37]

[edit] 20th century

[edit] Parliamentary Emigration Commission 1907–1913

Main article: Swedish Emigration Commission 1907–1913

Swedish emigrants boarding ship in Gothenburg in 1905.

Emigration rose again at the turn of the 20th century, reaching a new peak of about 35,000 Swedes in 1903. Figures remained high until World War I, alarming both conservative Swedes, who saw emigration as a challenge to national solidarity, and liberals, who envisioned the disappearance of the labor force necessary for economic development. One-fifth of all Swedes had made the United States their home,^[38] and a broad national consensus mandated that a Parliamentary Emigration Commission study the problem in 1907. Approaching the task with what Barton calls "characteristic Swedish thoroughness",^[39] the Commission published its findings and proposals in 21 large volumes. Legal restrictions on emigration were first proposed by the conservative members, but in the end dismissed by the Commission in favor of the liberal line of "bringing the best sides of America to Sweden" through social and economic reform. Topping the list of urgent reforms were universal male suffrage, better housing, and general economic development. The Commission especially hoped that a broader popular education would counteract "class and caste differences."^[40]

Class inequality in the hierarchic Swedish society was a strong and recurring theme in the Commission's findings. It appeared as a major motivator in the 289 personal narratives included in the report. These documents, of great research value and human interest today, were submitted by anonymous Swedes in Canada and the U.S. in response to solicitations in Swedish-American newspapers. The great majority of the writers expressed enthusiasm for their new homeland and criticized conditions in Sweden. Bitter experiences of Swedish class snobbery still rankled after sometimes 40–50 years in America, together with memories of the grim poverty in the Swedish countryside: the hard work, pitiful wages, and discouraging prospects. One woman wrote from North Dakota of how in her Värmland home parish, she had had to earn her living in peasant households from the age of eight, starting work at four in the morning and living on "rotten herring and potatoes, served out in small amounts so that I would not eat myself sick." She could see "no hope of saving anything in case of illness", but rather could see "the poorhouse waiting for me in the distance." When she was seventeen, her emigrated brothers sent her a prepaid ticket to America, and "the hour of freedom struck."^[41]

A year after the Commission published its last volume, World War I began and reduced emigration to a mere trickle. From the 1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration. Did the ambitious Emigration Commission have any part in solving the problem? Franklin D. Scott argues in an influential essay that the American Immigration Act of 1924 was the effective cause. Barton, by contrast, points to the rapid implementation of essentially all the Commission's recommendations, from industrialization to an array of social reforms, and maintains that its findings "must have had a powerful cumulative effect upon Sweden's leadership and broader public opinion."^[42]

[edit] Swedish Americans

The Midwest remained the heartland of the Swedish-American community, but its position weakened in the 20th century: in 1910, 54% of the Swedish immigrants and their children lived in the Midwest, 15% in industrial areas in the East, and 10% on the West Coast. Chicago was effectively the Swedish-American capital, accommodating about 10% of all Swedish Americans—more than 100,000 people—and making it the second-largest Swedish city in the world (only Stockholm had more Swedish inhabitants).^[43]

Defining themselves as both Swedish and American, the strongly cohesive Swedish-American community continued to show fascination with the Old Country and their relationship to it.^[44] Many middle-aged or elderly immigrants returned briefly to Sweden for a nostalgic visit around the turn of the century, and many narratives and observations from these trips were published by the numerous and productive Swedish-American publishing companies.^[45] They testify to complex feelings, but express above all an eagerness to return to the Midwest. While the travellers returning to their homeland were moved by meeting old friends and relations again, and by the natural beauty, they were shocked by Swedish manners. Indignant at the drunkenness and public swearing, the pervasive inequality and the class pride of the privileged, the absurdities of royal ceremony, and most especially the lack of respect for women, they returned home with a renewed pride in American culture.

[edit] 21st century: Swedish American legacy

Distribution of Swedish Americans in 2000, according to the United States Census. Please click on the map for a larger version.

Main article: Swedish American

In the 2000 U.S. Census, about four million Americans claimed to have Swedish roots.^[46] The true number is thought to be considerably higher, and self-identified Swedish Americans in the U.S. are expected soon to outnumber the nine million Swedes in Sweden.^[47] Minnesota remains by a wide margin the state with the most inhabitants of Swedish descent—9.6% of the population as of 2005.^[48]

The most well-known artistic representation of the Swedish mass migration is the epic four-novel suite The Emigrants (1949–59) by Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973). Portraying the lives of an emigrant family through several generations, the novels have sold nearly two million copies in Sweden and have been translated into more than twenty languages.^[49] The tetralogy has been filmed by Jan Troell as The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), and forms the basis of Kristina from Duvemåla, a 1995 musical by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.

In Sweden, the Småland city of Växjö is home to the Swedish Emigrant Institute (Svenska Emigrantinstitutet), founded in 1965 "to preserve records, interviews, and memorabilia relating to the period of major Swedish emigration between 1846 and 1930." In the U.S., there are hundreds of active Swedish-American organizations as of 2007, for which the Swedish Council of America functions as an umbrella group. There are Swedish-American museums in Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle.^[50]

[edit] See also

• Languages of the United States#Swedish
• Swedish colonization of the Americas

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Åkerman, Sune (1976). "Theories and Methods of Migration Research," in Runblom and Norman, From Sweden to America, 19–75.
• American FactFinder, United States Census, 2000. Consulted 31 June 2007.
• Andersson, Benny, and Ulvaeus, Björn. Kristina from Duvemåla (musical), consulted 7 May 2007.
• Barton, H. Arnold (1994). A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840–1940. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
• Barton, H. Arnold, Swedish America in Fifty Years—2050, a paper read to the Swedish American Historical Society on the occasion of the 1996 celebration of the Swedish Immigration Jubilee. Consulted 7 May 2007.
• Beijbom, Ulf. "Chicago, the Essence of "the Promised Land" at the Swedish Emigrant Institute. Click on "History", then "Chicago." Consulted 6 May 2007.
• Beijbom, Ulf (1996). "A Review of Swedish Emigration to America" at AmericanWest.com, consulted 2 Feb 2007.
• Brattne, Berit, and Sune Åkerman (1976). "The Importance of the Transport Sector for Mass Emigration," in Runblom and Norman, From Sweden to America, 176–200.
• Cipolla, Carlo (1966). Literacy and Development in the West. Harmondsworth.
• Elovson, Harald (1930). Amerika i svensk litteratur 1750–1820. Lund.
• Kälvemark, Ann-Sofie (1976). "Swedish Emigration Policy in an International Perspective, 1840–1925," in Runblom and Norman, From Sweden to America, 94–113.
• Norman, Hans (1976). "The Causes of Emigration," in Runblom and Norman, From Sweden to America, 149–164.
• The Swedish Emigrant Institute. Consulted 30 June 2007.
• Runblom, Harald, and Hans Norman (eds.) (1976). From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Scott, Franklin D. (1965). "Sweden's Constructive Opposition to Emigration," Journal of Modern History, Vol. 37, No. 3. (Sep., 1965), 307–335.
• Swensson Center, a research institute at Augustana College, Illinois. Consulted 7 May 2007.

[edit] External links

• The Swedish-American Historical Society is a non-profit organization founded in 1948 to "Record the Achievements of the Swedish Pioneers." The society publishes the academic journal The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly.