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Review Essays
THE SCANDINAVIAN MIGRATION FROM LOCAL AND TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
| Norwegians on the Prairie: Ethnicity and the Development of the Country Town. By Odd S. Lovoll. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006. xvii + 321 pp. Maps, tables, photos, notes, appendix, and index. $32.95 (cloth).The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860–1917. By Dag Blanck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. x + 256 pp. Tables, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth).The Old Country and the New: Essays on Swedes and America. By H. Arnold Barton. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. xv + 293 pp. Tables, photos, illustrations, notes, and index. $55.00 (cloth).
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Recently in the pages of this journal, Matthew Jacobson made a compelling plea for a greater sensitivity toward the transnational character of the field of immigration and ethnoracial history.1 Citing Oscar Handlin and John F. Kennedy, among others, he stressed the ways in which the field is inherently transnational, yet how the national has often intruded on our scholarship. As persuasive as Jacobson's point is regarding the field, his essay revealed an incomplete appreciation of its historiography. The work of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Frank Thistlethwaite, and Marcus Lee Hansen, to cite only a few examples from which Handlin and Kennedy might have profited, had explicitly transnational elements. Each in his or her own way attempted to view emigration and immigration as an integrated process that wed world capitalist development and the turn to modernity into a comprehensive whole. As scholars have recently rediscovered the transnational wheel, their understanding of those who preceded them is often lacking. |
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I write this in the context of this review because scholars who have focused on the Scandinavian migration—including Hansen and Thomas, but also Theodore C. Blegen, Ingrid Semmingsen, Kristian Hvidt, and Harald Runblom—have been remarkably transnational in their conceptualization of it. The books considered in this review, particularly those by Dag Blanck and H. Arnold Barton, illustrate that this understanding endures. Both in their own way, Blanck and Barton exhibit an understanding of the developments in the United States and the Swedish homeland. Odd Lovoll's orientation, in contrast, because his unit of analysis is the small town, is neither national nor transnational, but rather localist. |
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Lovoll has long been fascinated by the small town in the Norwegian American past, and his study of Benson, Minnesota, addresses this interest. Whereas Norwegian immigrants were among the most rural of any ethnic group in the United States, they were instrumental in the growth of midwestern small towns as well. And whereas scholars have focused their attention on the Norwegian farmer and big-city dweller, they have, Lovoll argues, given short shrift to the small town story. Lovoll's richly illustrated narrative thus fills a void, and he provides us with a lively description of Benson over a century and one-half. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I reviewed Lovoll's book for publication.) |
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Benson, located in Swift County in western Minnesota, had Norwegian American residents from its inception and continued to be associated with Norwegian America as a result. To be sure, the town contained those from a variety of backgrounds, including Yankee elements that dominated the financial institutions and the professions. Despite this heterogeneity, much of the business of the town was conducted in the Norwegian language. Even non-Norwegian businesses made efforts to attract Norwegian American customers, and their proprietors attempted to learn Norwegian. |
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