Swedish emigration to the United States

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 land of the U.S. frontier was a magnet for poor all over Europe, some factors encouraged Swedish emigration. There was widespread resentment against the religious repression practiced by the Swedish Lutheran State Church and the social conservatism and class snobbery of the Swedish monarchy. Population growth and crop failures made conditions in the Swedish countryside increasingly bleak. By contrast, reports from early Swedish emigrants painted the American Midwest as an earthly paradise, and praised American religious and political freedom and undreamed-of opportunities.

Swedish migration peaked in the decades after the American Civil War (1861–1865). By 1890 the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000. Most immigrants became classic pioneers, clearing and cultivating the prairies of the Great Plains, while others remained in the cities, particularly Chicago. Single young women usually went straight from agricultural work in the Swedish countryside to jobs as housemaids in American towns. 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 spending their declining years in Sweden, but changed their minds when faced with what they thought an arrogant aristocracy, a coarse and degraded laboring class, and a lack of respect for women.

After a dip in the 1890s, emigration rose again, causing national alarm in Sweden. A broad-based parliamentary emigration commission was instituted in 1907. It recommended social and economic reform in order to reduce emigration by "bringing the best sides of America to Sweden". The commission's major proposals were rapidly implemented: universal male suffrage, better housing, general economic development, and broader popular education. The effect of these measures is hard to assess, as World War I (1914–1918) broke out the year after the commission published its last volume, reducing emigration to a mere trickle. From the mid-1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration.

Early history: the Swedish-American dream

The Swedish West India Company established a colony on the Delaware River in 1638, naming it New Sweden. A small, short-lived colonial settlement, New Sweden contained at its height only some 600 Swedish and Finnish settlers (Finland was then part of Sweden). It was lost to the Dutch in New Netherland in 1655. Nevertheless, the descendants of the original colonists maintained spoken Swedish 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. America was seen as the standard-bearer of enlightenment and freedom, and became an ideal for liberal Swedes. Their admiration for America was combined with the notion of a past Swedish Golden Age with ancient Nordic ideals. Supposedly corrupted by foreign influences, the timeless "Swedish values" would be recovered by Swedes in the New World. This remained a fundamental theme of Swedish, and later Swedish-American, discussion of America, though the recommended "timeless" values changed over time. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Swedes who called for greater religious freedom would often refer to America as the supreme symbol of it. The emphasis shifted from religion to politics in the 19th century, when liberal citizens of the hierarchic Swedish class society looked with admiration to the American republican government and American civil rights. In the early 20th century, the Swedish-American dream even embraced the ideal of a welfare state responsible for the well-being of all its citizens. Underneath these shifting ideas ran from the start the current which carried all before it in the later 20th century: America as the symbol and dream of unfettered individualism. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 5–7.]

Swedish debate about America remained mostly theoretical before the 19th century, since very few Swedes had any personal experience of the nation. Emigration was illegal and population was seen as the wealth of nations. [Kälvemark, 94–96.] However, the Swedish population doubled between 1750 and 1850, [See Beijbom, " [http://www.americanwest.com/swedemigr/pages/emigra.htm Review] ".] 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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 11.]

19th century

European mass emigration: push and pull

Large-scale European emigration to the United States started in the 19th century in Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, followed by a rising wave after 1850 from most Northern European countries, and in turn by Central and Southern Europe. Research into the forces behind this European mass emigration has relied on sophisticated statistical methods. [Åkerman, "passim".] 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. [Norman, 150–153.] Jerome's conclusions have been challenged, but still form the basis of much work on the subject. [Runblom and Norman, 315.] [Norman, "passim".]

Emigration patterns in the Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—show striking variation. 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 consistently low rate of emigration, while Iceland had a late start but soon reached levels comparable to Norway. Finland, whose mass emigration did not start until the late 1880s, is usually classified as part of the Eastern European wave. [Runblom and Norman, 315.]

Crossing the Atlantic

The first European emigrants travelled in the holds of sailing cargo ships. With the advent of the age of steam, an efficient transatlantic passenger transport mechanism was established at the end of the 1860s. It was based on huge ocean liners run by international shipping lines, most prominently Cunard, White Star, and Inman. The speed and capacity of the large steamships meant that tickets became cheaper. From the Swedish port towns of Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg, transport companies 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. [Brattne and Åkerman, 179–181.]

During the later 19th century, the major 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. Propaganda and advertising by shipping line agents was often blamed for emigration by the conservative Swedish ruling class, which grew increasingly alarmed at seeing the agricultural labor force leave the country. It was a Swedish 19th-century cliché to blame the falling ticket prices and the pro-emigration propaganda of the transport system for the "craze" of emigration, but modern historians have varying views about the real importance of such factors. Brattne and Åkerman have examined the advertising campaigns and the ticket prices as a possible third force between "push" and "pull". They conclude that neither advertisements nor pricing 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 that ticket prices did drop in the 1880s, but remained on average artificially high because of cartels and price-fixing. [Brattne and Åkerman, 179–181, 186–189, 199–200.] On the other hand, H. A. Barton states that the cost of crossing the Atlantic dropped drastically between 1865 and 1890, encouraging poorer Swedes to emigrate. [Barton, 38.] The research of Brattne and Åkerman has shown that the leaflets sent out by the shipping line agents to prospective emigrants would not so much celebrate conditions in the New World, as simply emphasize the comforts and advantages of the particular company. Descriptions of life in America were unvarnished, and the general advice to emigrants brief and factual. Newspaper advertising, while very common, tended to be repetitive and stereotyped in content. [Brattne and Åkerman, 187–192.]

Mid-19th century

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." [Unonius, quoted in Barton, "A Folk Divided", 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 make a living from the tiny 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 American Midwest was an agricultural antipode to Småland, for it, Unonius reported 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." [Quoted in Barton, "A Folk Divided, 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 irresistible to landless and impoverished European peasants. 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 had access to the egalitarian and radical ideas that shook Europe in the 1840s. [Cipollo, 115, estimates adult literacy in Sweden at 90% in 1850, which places it highest among the European countries he has surveyed.] The clash between Swedish liberalism and a repressive monarchist regime raised political awareness among the disadvantaged, many of whom looked to the U.S. to realize their republican ideals.

Dissenting religious practitioners also widely resented the treatment they received from the Lutheran State Church. Conflicts between local worshippers and the new churches 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 often provoked whole groups of pietists to 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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 15–16.]

The first Swedish emigrant guidebook was published as early as 1841, the year Unonius left, and nine handbooks were published between 1849 and 1855. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 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 secular authorities. Many emigrant diaries and memoirs feature an emblematic early scene in which the local clergy warns travellers against risking their souls among foreign heretics. 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." [Proclaimed in an article in the newspaper "Nya Wermlandstidningen" in April 1855; quoted by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 20–22.] Emigration was denounced as an unreasoning "mania" or "craze", implanted in 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. ["Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning," 1849, quoted in Barton, "A Folk Divided," 24.] "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!" [1851, quoted and translated by Barton, "A Folk Divided," 24.]

Late 19th century

Swedish immigration to the United States reached its height in the decades immediately after the American Civil War (1861–1865). The size of the Swedish-American community in 1865 is estimated at 25,000, 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 immigration peaking in 1869 and again in 1887. [The exact figure is 776,093 people (Barton, "A Folk Divided", 37).] Most of this 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 [1867 and 1868 were the worst years for crop failure, which ruined many smallholders; see Barton, "A Folk Divided", 37.] and pulled towards America by the cheap land resulting from the 1862 Homestead Act. Most immigrants became pioneers, clearing and cultivating the virgin land of the Midwest and extending the pre-Civil War settlements further west, into Kansas and Nebraska. [ [http://www.augustana.edu/swenson/history.htm Swensson Center] .] 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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 17.]

Other forces worked to push the new immigrants towards the cities, particularly Chicago. According to H. A. Barton, the cost of crossing the Atlantic dropped by more than half between 1865 and 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 fuller Americanization, as young, single individuals with little money took whatever jobs they could get, often in cities. Large 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. [Beijbom, " [http://www.utvandrarnashus.se/eng/ Chicago] "] A growing proportion stayed in urban centers, combining emigration with the flight from the countryside which was happening in the homeland and all across Europe. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 38–41.]

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." [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 41.] 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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 41.]

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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 39–40.] 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," wrote the Congregational missionary M. W. Montgomery in 1885; "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." [Quoted by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 40.] The Scandinavians were also welcomed as Protestant counterweights to the many Irish Catholic immigrants. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 18.] A number of well-established and longtime Swedish Americans visited Sweden in the 1870s, making comments that 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. [Private letters by Anders Larsson in the 1870s, summarized by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 59.] The most notable visitor was Hans Mattsson (1832–1893), 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, Mattsson wrote in his "Reminiscences" that this contrast was the key to the greatness of America, where "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." [Quoted by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 60–61.]

Mattsson's first recruiting visit came immediately after 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

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." 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." [Quoted by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 63.]

Swedish emigration dropped dramatically just before the turn of the 20th century, while remigration rose, as conditions in Sweden improved. 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. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 80.]

20th century

Parliamentary Emigration Commission 1907–1913

Immigration 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 feared the disappearance of the labor force necessary for economic development. One-fifth of all Swedes had made the United States their home, [1.4 million first- and second-generation Swedish immigrants lived in the U.S. in 1910, while Sweden's population at the time was 5.5 million; see Beijbom, " [http://www.americanwest.com/swedemigr/pages/emigra.htm Review] ".] 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", [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 149.] the Commission published its findings and proposals in 21 large volumes. The Commission rejected conservative proposals for legal restrictions on emigration and in the end supported 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 broader popular education would counteract "class and caste differences." [The phrase is from Ernst Beckman's original liberal parliamentary motion for instituting the Commission; quoted by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 149.]

Class inequality in 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 requests in Swedish-American newspapers. The great majority of replies 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. Writers recalled the hard work, pitiful wages, and grim poverty of life in the Swedish countryside. 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." [Quoted from Volume VII of the Survey by Barton, "A Folk Divided", 152.]

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. The influence of the Emigration Commission to solve the problem is still a matter of debate. Franklin D. Scott argues in an influential essay that the American Immigration Act of 1924 was the cause. Barton, by contrast, points to the rapid implementation of essentially all the Commission's recommendations, from industrialization to an array of social reforms. He maintains that its findings "must have had a powerful cumulative effect upon Sweden's leadership and broader public opinion." [Barton, "A Folk Divided",165.]

wedish 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—making it the second-largest Swedish city in the world (only Stockholm had more Swedish inhabitants). [ [http://www.augustana.edu/swenson/history.htm Swensson Center] .]

Defining themselves as both Swedish and American, the Swedish-American community retained a fascination for the old country and their relationship to it. The nostalgic visits to Sweden which had begun in the 1870s continued well into the 20th century, and narratives from these trips formed a staple of the lively Swedish-American publishing companies. [For Swedish American publishing, see Barton, "A Folk Divided", 212–213, 254.] The accounts testify to complex feelings, but each contingent of American travellers were freshly indignant at Swedish class pride and Swedish disrespect for women. It was with renewed pride in American culture that they returned to the Midwest. [Barton, "A Folk Divided", 103 ff.]

21st century: Swedish-American legacy

thumb|350px|right|Distribution_of_Swedish_Americans_in_2000_by_county,_according_to_the_United States Census

In the 2000 U.S. Census, about four million Americans claimed to have Swedish roots. [ [http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFIteratedFacts?_event=&geo_id=01000US&_geoContext=01000US&_street=&_county=&_cityTown=&_state=&_zip=&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_submenuId=factsheet_2&ds_name=DEC_2000_SAFF&_ci_nbr=569&qr_name=DEC_2000_SAFF_A1010&reg=DEC_2000_SAFF_A1010%3A569&_keyword=&_industry= American FactFinder, Fact Sheet "Swedish"] .] 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. [Barton, " [http://www.swedishamericanhist.org/arnoldbarton.html Swedish America in Fifty Years—2050] "] Minnesota remains by a wide margin the state with the most inhabitants of Swedish descent—9.6% of the population as of 2005. [ [http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=ACS_2005_EST_G00_DP2&-geo_id=04000US27&-ds_name=ACS_2005_EST_G00_&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false American FactFinder: Minnesota, Selected Social Characteristics in the United States, 2005] .]

The best-known artistic representation of the Swedish mass migration is the epic four-novel suite "The Emigrants" (1949–1959) 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. [Moberg biography by JoAnn Hanson-Stone at the [http://www.utvandrarnashus.se/eng/ Swedish Emigrant Institute] .] 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 former ABBA members 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." [ [http://www.utvandrarnashus.se/eng/ Swedish Emigrant Institute] .] The House of the Emigrants ("Emigranternas Hus") was founded in Gothenburg, the main port for Swedish emigrants, in 2004. The centre shows exhibitions on migration and has a research hall for genealogy. [ [http://www.emigranternashus.se/indexENG.html House of the Emigrants] .] 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. [ [http://www.augustana.edu/swenson/history.htm Swensson Center] .]

ee also

* American Swedish Institute
* Swedish colonization of the Americas
* Swedish language in the United States
* Swedish-American relations

Notes

References

*Åkerman, Sune (1976). "Theories and Methods of Migration Research," in Runblom and Norman, "From Sweden to America", 19–75.
* [http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en American FactFinder] , United States Census, 2000. Consulted 30 June 2007.
*Andersson, Benny, and Ulvaeus, Björn. " [http://www.duvemala.com/eng/ 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, [http://www.swedishamericanhist.org/arnoldbarton.html 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. [http://www.utvandrarnashus.se/eng/ "Chicago, the Essence of "the Promised Land"] at the [http://www.utvandrarnashus.se/eng/ Swedish Emigrant Institute] . Click on "History", then "Chicago." Consulted 6 May 2007.
*Beijbom, Ulf (1996). [http://www.americanwest.com/swedemigr/pages/emigra.htm "A Review of Swedish Emigration to America"] at [http://www.americanwest.com/ 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.
*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.
*The [http://www.utvandrarnashus.se/eng/ Swedish Emigrant Institute] . Consulted 30 June 2007.
* [http://www.augustana.edu/swenson/history.htm Swensson Center] , a research institute at Augustana College, Illinois. Consulted 7 May 2007.

External links

* [http://www.swedishamericanhist.org/ 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 [http://www.swedishamericanhist.org/pub.html "The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly"] .