Norwegian Immigrants Research Articles

Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas: Norwegian Immigrants 1845–1900 by Gunnar Nerheim (review)

Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas: Norwegian Immigrants 1845–1900 by Gunnar Nerheim (review)

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Wielding the Sword of the Spirit. Volume Two: The Doctrine & Practice of Church Fellowship in the Synodical Conference (1868–1877) by Peter M. Prange

Reviewed by: Wielding the Sword of the Spirit. Volume Two: The Doctrine & Practice of Church Fellowship in the Synodical Conference (1868–1877) by Peter M. Prange Mark Mattes Wielding the Sword of the Spirit. Volume Two: The Doctrine & Practice of Church Fellowship in the Synodical Conference (1868–1877). By Peter M. Prange. Wauwatosa, Wisconsin: Joh. Ph. Koehler Press, 2022. 286 pp. This book is the second installment of a multi-volume project that examines how leaders in the Synodical Conference, a nineteenth-and early twentieth-century coalition of six confessional Lutheran synods, determined how to practice church fellowship so as not to promote unionism, that is, the feigning of fellowship with non-Lutherans when, on the basis of sound doctrine, no such fellowship exists. "Wielding the Sword of the Spirit" is a metaphor for determining when to say no to "unionistic" tendencies. In his first volume, Prange, a Wisconsin Synod pastor, presented the rise of C. F. W. Walther as the leader who emerged after the downfall of Martin Stephan, the head of the Saxon immigration of anti-unionistic Lutherans to Perry County, Missouri. Stephan had advocated a kind of episcopal leadership, and, with his dethronement, Walther proposed a congregationalist approach to church governance. In both volumes, Walther emerges as adamantly anti-unionist, but never in a legalistic way. In fact, Walther's tone was ever pastoral. "Generally [End Page 118] speaking, he [Walther] judged cases individually and resisted the temptation of painting with too broad a brush. He was especially careful about not drawing conclusions based solely on a person's church affiliation. He treasured Spirit-worked Christian fellowship above every other association" (41). Walther ever acknowledged that true Christians were present in non-Lutheran bodies and that our understanding of doctrine was "piecemeal" (55). Prange's second volume continues the saga of Walther's influence on those synods which would join forces for mutual support and accountability as the Synodical Conference. The Synodical Conference came about due to the conviction that while the General Council's confessional stance, in opposition to the unionistic General Synod, was sound, it was unable to consistently practice its ideal of Lutheran pulpits for Lutheran clergy only and Lutheran altars for Lutheran communicants only. This second volume focuses on the origin and doctrinal stance of the Wisconsin Synod whose roots were in the unionistic mission societies in Prussia but which within its first quarter century embraced a more conservative confessional stance. Indeed, the Wisconsin Synod terminated its membership in the General Council in 1869. Prange is helpful in showing the extent of communication between the heirs of the Mühlenberg tradition in the General Synod and the General Council with the more recent German and Norwegian immigrants in the upper Midwest. He also shows how problematic and troubling the theory of "open questions," advocated by the Bavarian missional pastor Wilhelm Löhe and the Iowa Synod, was for those synods which formed the Synodical Conference. While Wisconsin leaders saw merit in Iowa's ability to avoid theological extremism, Walther's wholesale rejection of "open questions" would carry the day for Wisconsin and other groups in the Synodical Conference. Clearly, for Walther, "open questions" built more theological pluralism into a confessional tradition than is warranted by the scriptures and the confessions. Prange notes that the debates over the doctrine of election and objective justification, the view that the entire world is justified, at least objectively, in Christ's death and resurrection, which led to the departure of the Joint Synod of Ohio from the Synodical [End Page 119] Conference, had less to do with doctrine and more to do with leaders' fear of losing positions of leadership (267). Prange covers material well-known to North American Lutheran historians. His work merits attention because he allows the personalities of the leaders to emerge and provides details that give us a sense for what congregational life was like in this era. The image he portrays of Walther is a much kinder and gentler hero than what extreme conservatives among North American Lutherans advocate. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des Moines, Iowa Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Mathematical Ability of Norwegian Immigrants Is Predictable from Country of Origin

Mathematical Ability of Norwegian Immigrants Is Predictable from Country of Origin

Norwegian Baking on the Prairie, 1851–1859: The Transition to Wheat Flour and Leavened Bread Seen Through the Letters, Diary Entries, and Recipes of Linka Preus, Elisabeth Koren, and Caja Munch

Abstract: This article critically examines previously unpublished recipes from the hand-written notebooks of Elisabeth Koren and Linka Preus, putting them in context with their published letters and diary entries and the letters of their contemporary Caja Munch, in order to show how Norwegian women transitioned to baking with fine wheat flour and yeast in America during the 1850s. Such baking was little known to women even of the upper class in Norway at a time when wheat was used only on the rarest occasions. Between the three women they record five recipes for yeast, attributing them to Norwegian immigrants of both high and low classes, showing how the struggle with yeasted baking affected diverse women on the prairie. At a critical inflection point in Norwegian culinary and agricultural history, when Norway was at its peak in domestic grain agriculture and had yet to significantly import inexpensive wheat and rye, these three immigrants show how they reinterpreted a staple of their diet to the ingredients and technology available to them in the New World. The challenges they encountered and the innovations they discovered anticipated major changes that would come just a couple of decades later in their home land.

Expression of Emotions in The Norwegian-American Immigrant Letters, 1838-1848

Emotions are integral to human mobility. However, research on the expression of emotions in the letters of early immigrants is often neglected. This study on emotional expressions in early Norwegian-American immigrant letters, exchanged between 1838 and 1848, is a case in point. This article explores the dynamics in emotional expressions in the early letters of Norwegian-American immigrants. It shows how immigrants expressed their emotions in the letters addressed to their family members, neighbours and friends. This article also investigates the presence of emotional calls in the immigrant letters, which successfully pulled more people from Norway to America. Unlike many other early immigrant groups, Norwegian immigrants in America were satisfied with their migration experience and expressed more positive emotions in their home-going letters than negative ones. Considering the lack of research on the emotional aspects of migration, this paper recommends conducting more studies on this area.

Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say “You're Welcome Here”?

Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say “You're Welcome Here”?

Child Naming Patterns as an Indication of Assimilation: A Case Study in Eastern Washington’s Selbu Community

In 1901, a small group of Norwegian immigrants relocated from Minnesota to Eastern Washington. The community grew quickly, with other immigrants coming directly from Norway. The group maintained a strong Norwegian character for several decades; for example, their church continued to hold services in Norwegian until the late 1920’s. Assimilation into American society was evidenced by the names the community members gave to their children, as traditional Norwegian names were quickly replaced by more typically American monikers. This paper examines the extent to which the assignment of forenames represents the assimilation of Washington’s Selbu community into the broader American society around it.

Ethnic enclaves and immigrant outcomes: Norwegian immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of ethnic enclaves on economic outcomes of Norwegian immigrants in 1910 and 1920, the later part of the Age of Mass Migration. Using various identification strategies, including county fixed effects and an instrumental variables strategy based on chain migration, I consistently find that Norwegians living in larger enclaves in the United States had lower occupational earnings, were more likely to be in farming occupations, and were less likely to be in white-collar occupations. Results are robust to matching method and choice of occupational score. This earnings disadvantage is partly passed on to the second generation.

The Creation of a Norwegian-American Identity in the usa

Ethnic identity formation is the result of a process wherein the migrant combines both pre-existing values and attitudes and present experiences of the same group and its relations with other groups. This article discusses identity formation among Norwegian immigrants in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words, how did Norwegian immigrants arriving from a homogeneous society develop a separate identity in the multicultural society of the United States, and to what factors can we attribute this development? In a cultural process of change called ‘ethnicisation’, immigrants were transformed from the status of ‘foreigners’ to become ‘ethnics’, that is ‘Norwegian-Americans’. Identity is thus connected to the term ‘ethnicity’, and I will first present different perspectives on the term ethnicity, followed by a short summary of Norwegian migration patterns to the United States up until the early twentieth century. I will end the article by discussing components that explain the existence of a Norwegian-American identity.

The Costly and Demanding—Exploring Solution-Based Othering of ‘Non-European Immigrants’ in Norwegian Policy Recommendations

This article examines the Norwegian scholarly report titled NOU 2017:2—Integration and Trust: Long-Term Consequences of High Immigration (English translation; chapter 1.1) to unpack how ‘non-European immigrants’ are constructed as an economic and social challenge for the welfare state. Principles from discourse theory (DT) and the conceptual framework of othering are applied to discuss how the designation of this category of people as objects of qualification/integration may serve to reify racialized relations of inferiorized difference between white Norwegian majorities and societal newcomers from the Global South. The author tracks this dynamic to a discourse in which the relationship between the Norwegian state and immigrants from countries outside of Europe is organized as a binary opposition between a vulnerable self and an overwhelming, inherently faceless ‘other’. It is suggested that the othering enabled in the NOU (Norges Offentlige Utredninger) report can be viewed as a specific production of monstrosity: a horror-vision of a failing, unintegrated welfare state that needs safeguarding against abnormal, ‘huge waves’ of immigrants from ‘further south’. The argument is finally presented that the report’s vision of integration, by being coded with the logic of presenting a necessary response to an existential threat to welfare state structures, engenders a precarious form of social distancing that is theorized as solution-based othering.

Language mixing within verbs and nouns in American Norwegian

This paper presents case-studies of language mixing within verbs and nouns in the heritage language American Norwegian, which refers to varieties spoken by Norwegian immigrants to the US and their descendants. The paper builds on data from the newly established Corpus of American Norwegian Speech and argues in favor of an exoskeletal approach to language mixing. This approach distinguishes between abstract syntactic feature bundles and the morphophonological realization of these bundles, much like in late insertion approaches to morphology. A main goal of the paper is to show how the word-internal mixing patterns observed in American Norwegian can be analyzed in a model of grammar employing an exoskeletal approach with late-insertion.

Forts on Burial Mounds: Interlocked Landscapes of Mourning and Colonialism at the Dakota-Settler Frontier, 1860–1876

During the 19th century, the U.S. government took ownership of Dakota homelands in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, leading to increasingly violent conflicts and decades of war. Military and militia forts were built at the physical boundaries of contested space to push “hostiles” west and to protect European American settlers. Fort Wadsworth, constructed in South Dakota during the 1864 Dakota Campaign, and Fort Juelson, built in 1876 by Norwegian immigrants during an “Indian scare” in Minnesota, were both knowingly constructed on top of burial mounds, appropriating and reshaping sacred Native American landscapes into protective enclosures for the dominating, yet fearful, colonizers. Aerial laser scanning, geophysical survey, and historical research explore the archaeological expression and significance of these interlocked landscapes at geographic and cognitive frontiers.

Medievalist Comics and the American Century by Chris Bishop

Reviewed by: Medievalist Comics and the American Century by Chris Bishop David Sweeten (bio) Chris Bishop. Medievalist Comics and the American Century. University of Mississippi Press, 2016. 224 pp. $65. In the introduction to Medievalist Comics and the American Century, Chris Bishop discusses historical methodology more than one might expect when cracking the cover of a study on comics. More than a simple close reading of a selection of American comics with medieval aspects, this book endeavors to prove that "these comics are not merely happenchance artifacts, but that each individual success or failure was both a result and an indicator of the centrality of certain American preoccupations within a broader cultural context" (4). In each of his chapters Bishop locates a nexus of medievalist associations, or the lack thereof, and then maps this nexus onto the production and reception of a medievalist comic. While Bishop states his work plays "in the slipstream between history and literature, particularly popular literature" (5), the composition of each chapter leans more heavily on the former in developing a historical locus for the chapter's namesake. These loci provide the strongest moments of this book and new angles to the larger discussion of American comics production, but these moments often come at the cost of in-depth discussion of the comics themselves. Throughout this book Bishop tackles, implicitly and explicitly, medievalism studies, and there are some issues in the handling of these matters; Richard Utz handily quantifies these issues in his review of Bishop's book in Arthuriana, especially in his discussion of the final chapter "The Stories Upon Which We Agree."1 I will leave these matters to Utz's review, but where Utz approaches the book from the perspective of a medieval scholar commenting in a journal of medieval studies, I will focus instead on what Bishop's book brings to comics scholars. The strength of Bishop's approach lies with the case studies in its chapters, placing transmission, reception, and historical context in conversation. Bishop's first five chapters plot how the transmission of cultural artifacts reflects larger social dynamics in the twentieth century. In his discussion of Prince Valiant, Bishop follows the production history of adventure comic strips and the market demands of early comic publishing against the nostalgic context of Pyle's Arthurian retellings, leading to a nexus between publisher William Randolph Hearst's fascination with the Middle Ages, his connections to John F. Kennedy, and the idealization of Kennedy's own "Camelot." The chapter on Green [End Page 127] Arrow follows the transmission history of Robin Hood from late medieval tales to a representation of early American ideals and finally into a comic character perpetually difficult to market. This difficulty continued until DC developed Green Arrow, in particular when the character was refashioned into a social commentator aligned with the iconoclast movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bishop changes tactics slightly in his chapter on Thor, noting how Norse mythology at large had become a battleground for political and nationalist movements in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, reflected again in the fight over Thor as intellectual property between publishing companies and, more specifically, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Bishop suggests that the continued attempts to bring Thor to the comics page represents the commodification of cultural identity for German and Norwegian immigrants in the United States, and this process continued with other Norse sagas and texts like the Nibelungenlied. As a character created whole cloth rather than transmitted from an earlier medieval tradition, the chapter on Conan centers on how Robert E. Howard's musclebound barbarian descends from the American mythology of the Wild West. Moreover, Bishop demonstrates the role of comics in drafting characters into more prominent positions of popular culture, Howard's character becoming more popular after he was translated to the comics page. Bishop's analysis of Red Sonja plots an interesting parallel with the treatment of women in medievalist texts and comics, noting how each is predicated on an assumed tradition that, even with the best intentions, denies female characters agency yet is affected by the growing Women's Movement in the 1960s, demonstrated in Red Sonja as "a persistent tension between...

A Model of Underspecified Recognition for Phonological Integration: English Loan Vowels in American Norwegian

Using loanword data from Haugen (1953), this paper investigates variation in vowel integrations of English loanwords in the Norwegian among 19th century Norwegian immigrants to the United States, as first-language Norwegian and second-language English speakers. Previous research, most notably Flege (1995), has argued that speakers make use of L1 categories that are the most similar to the integrated L2 sound. In contrast, this research argues that the “most similar,” as well as less similar but attested, L1 integrated phonemes can be understood through the Lahiri and Reetz (2002) Underspecified Recognition model, where phonetic features of L2 input sounds are mapped onto hierarchically organized L1 distinctive features (i.e., Dresher, 2009).

TO THE NEW WORLD AND BACK AGAIN: RETURN MIGRANTS IN THE AGE OF MASS MIGRATION.

The authors compile large data sets from Norwegian and US historical censuses to study return migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913). Norwegian immigrants who returned to Norway held lower-paid occupations than did Norwegian immigrants who stayed in the United States, both before and after their first transatlantic migration, suggesting they were negatively selected from the migrant pool. Upon returning to Norway, return migrants held higher-paid occupations relative to Norwegians who never moved, despite hailing from poorer backgrounds. These patterns suggest that despite being negatively selected, return migrants had been able to accumulate savings and could improve their economic circumstances once they returned home.

Governor Nelson Dingley lives on: Maine, California, Norway and protectionism

This article examines, from Norwegian sources, the stormy relationship between the local American canned fish industry and the Norwegian producers – and American importers – of Norwegian canned fish, principally ‘sardines’ (sprats) and herring. American opposition took the form of protectionism, either as direct import duty, or by implied criticism of the Norwegian industry (use of child labour or ‘inexperienced’ producers, or claims of ‘dumping’ sub-standard goods on the US market). Opposition varied with the national and international politics and economics of the day, with Republicans and Democrats raising and reducing tariffs depending on the state (and complaints) of the local canning industries in Monterey and Maine. The Great Crash and resulting devaluation of foreign currencies against the dollar, and thereafter abandoning the gold standard, also played their part. The Dingley Tariff, the Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act, the Underwood Tariff, the Fordney–McCumber Tariff and GATT are treated in more detail. In the end, it was acknowledged that it was not a matter of competition, but of preferences for Norwegian sprat canned in olive oil, as opposed to American herring packed in cottonseed oil, and primarily marketed to Norwegian immigrants. In all, the issue lasted for over 70 years, ending in the words – to the Norwegian National Canneries Association – ‘ Congratulations unanimous win in tariff commission’.

Across the Deep Blue Sea: The Saga of Early Norwegian Immigrants from Norway to America Through the Canadian Gateway

Across the Deep Blue Sea: The Saga of Early Norwegian Immigrants from Norway to America Through the Canadian Gateway

Migration, Regionalism, and the Ethnic Other, 1840-1870

This article shows accounts of Norwegian immigrants and their encounter with various ethnic groups in America including Native Americans, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, and Yankees in the period between 1840 and 1870. The article presents several regions in the United States, namely the Upper Midwest, Texas, and California. The use of primary source material including newspapers, guidebooks and letters provide good insights into thoughts and attitudes, and not the least prejudice, among this Old immigrant group toward the ethnic “Other.” The Norwegian immigrant group aimed at becoming good citizens through a negotiating process between the group, the dominant native-born American group and other ethnic groups in the United States. By characterizing several other ethnic groups based on race, Norwegian-Americans employed whiteness in a double negotiation, both tied to the creation of a Norwegian-American identity and in finding their place in the social hierarchy in America.

Across the Deep Blue Sea: The Saga of Early Norwegian Immigrants from Norway to America through the Canadian Gateway

Across the Deep Blue Sea: The Saga of Early Norwegian Immigrants from Norway to America through the Canadian Gateway