"In this collection are seventeen essays and seven editorials by Barton and published in leading journals between 1974 and 2005. The subjects include post-World War II Swedish immigration and remigration to Sweden. A full bibliography of Barton's publications on Swedish-American history and culture is included"--Provided by publisher

"What happens to a people ... when it becomes divided and separated through a great overseas migration? ... how do the two parts of such a divided people relate to each other? What ideas do they have regarding each other as the process continues and as time and circumstance cause them to develop in separate ways of their own? The purpose of this book is to seek answers to such questions in the case of the Swedes during the period of their great migration, between roughly 1840 and 1940." -- Pref.

In Pole Raising and Speech Making, author Jennifer Eastman Attebery focuses on the beginnings of the traditional Scandinavian Midsummer celebration and the surrounding spring-to-summer seasonal festivities in the Rocky Mountain West during the height of Swedish immigration to the area—1880–1917. Combining research in folkloristics and history, Attebery explores various ways that immigrants blended traditional Swedish Midsummer-related celebrations with local civic celebrations of American Independence Day on July 4 and the Mormons’ Pioneer Day on July 24. Functioning as multimodal observances with multiple meanings, these holidays represent and reconsider ethnicity and panethnicity, sacred and secular relationships, and the rural and the urban, demonstrating how flexible and complex traditional celebrations can be. Providing a wealth of detail and information surrounding little-studied celebrations and valuable archival and published primary sources—diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper reports, and images—Pole Raising and Speech Making is proof that non-English immigrant culture must be included when discussing “American” culture. It will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in ethnic studies, folklore, ritual and festival studies, and Scandinavian American cultural history.

Beginning in the 1830s and stretching into the first decades of the twentieth century, the Lutheran state churches of Scandinavia experienced a great spiritual awakening. At the center of this movement were devotional materials and sermons made accessible through colporteurs and booksellers throughout Scandinavia, as well as among immigrants in North America. Two of the most influential and widely-read authors of this period were the Swedish preachers, Carl Olof Rosenius (1816-1868) and Paul Peter Waldenstrom (1838-1917), who became household names through their immensely popular devotional journal Pietisten ("The Pietist"). Both men emerged from the long tradition of revivalism within the Lutheran state churches of Europe known as Pietism, and consciously drew on this heritage as they helped to articulate and redefine the priorities of revival Christianity in a new era. This collection includes many excerpts never before translated into English, as well as an accessible and thorough introduction to these authors' careers and historical contexts. Influenced by their irenic tone, simplicity, and evangelical warmth, translator and editor Mark Safstrom makes available some of the best of Rosenius's and Waldenstrom's writing for a new generation of laypeople, pastors, and scholars.

This book is the product of Donald Akenson's decades of research and writing on Irish social history and its relationship to the Irish diaspora - it is also the product of a lifetime of trying to figure out where Swedish-America actually came from, and why. These two matters, Akenson shows, are intimately related. Ireland and Sweden each provide a tight case study of a larger phenomenon, one that, for better or worse, shaped the modern world: the Great European Diaspora of the "true" nineteenth century. Akenson's book parts company with the great bulk of recent emigration research by employing sharp transnational comparisons and by situating the two case studies in the larger context of the Great European Migration and of what determines the physics of a diaspora: no small matter, as the concept of diaspora has become central to twenty-first-century transnational studies. He argues (against the increasing refusal of mainstream historians to use empirical databases) that the history community still has a lot to learn from economic historians; and, simultaneously, that (despite the self-confidence of their proponents) narrow, economically based explanations of the Great European Migration leave out many of the most important aspects of the whole complex transaction. Akenson believes that culture and economic matters both count, and that leaving either one on the margins of explanation yields no valid explanation at all.

"In his book, Dag Blanck analyzes how Swedish American identity was constructed, maintained, and changed in the Augustana Synod from 1860 to 1917. The author poses three fundamental questions: How did an ethnic identity develop in the Augustana synod? Of what did that ethnic identity consist? Why did that ethnic identity come into being?" "[summary]"--Provided by publisher