| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Norwegians on the Prairie: Ethnicity and the Development of the Country Town. By Odd S. Lovoll. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006. xviii, 321 pp. $32.95, ISBN 978-0-87351-571-9.)

With our focus either on the urban or the rural, the in-between society of the country town has not been fully explored. One census criterion for "urban" is a population of at least 2,500. In common usage, however, a country town is not urban, nor has it been viewed as very attractive: the writers E. W. Howe (The Story of a Country Town, 1883) and Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, 1920) created the images many still have of country towns. In recent ethnicity studies, such as David R. Roediger's Working toward Whiteness (2005) and Matthew Frye Jacobson's Roots Too (2006), the small town is irrelevant; Jacobson is interested in urban intellectual history, and Roediger's immigrant journey to the suburbs is via the industrial city. The country towners of Odd S. Lovoll's Norwegians on the Prairie have not made that journey, nor has their ethnicity been much in need of a revival.

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