| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dag Blanck. The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860–1917. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 256. $55.00.
The present book is a revised and updated version of Dag Blanck's Ph.D. dissertation, originally published in Sweden (1997). It addresses the question of identity formation within the Augustana Synod, the most important Swedish American Lutheran body, from its founding in 1860 to American entry into World War I. Inspired by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's path-breaking collection, The Invention of Tradition (1983), and Benedict Anderson's equally important Imagined Communities (1983), Blanck sets out to investigate how the leadership of Augustana actively sought to construct a specifically Swedish American identity. Furthermore, challenging the view that boundary maintenance is more important for ethnic identity formation than the "cultural stuff" inside, Blanck analyzes what constituted this identity. Finally, Blanck grapples briefly with the question of why an ethnic leadership attempted—with considerable success—to foist its views of identity on the whole Swedish American community.	1
In pursuing these objectives, Blanck follows three lines of investigation. First, he studies the educational system at the synod's oldest and largest educational institution, Augustana College, investigating both academic curricular developments and various extracurricular activities, such as student literary societies and ethnic festivities. Blanck also analyzes the makeup of the student body, most of whose members, it turns out, remained within "the Augustana sphere" throughout their careers, many of them as ministers.	. . .

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