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Thousands of Swedes settled in Moline, Illinois, from the late 1840s through the 1920s. For many years they made up the largest ethnic group in the city. They came to work in the plow factories and to join relatives who were here before them. Lilly Setterdahl has drawn from many different sources and brought forward a mosaic of facts and photographs. The reader will learn about the environment facing the new immigrants, how they conquered the challenges of adapting to another culture and language to become Americans and, in many cases, significant contributors to society. Other immigrants groups, no doubt, experienced the same tribulations and rewards. The work at hand is unique in many ways. As far as is known, no other Swedish-American researcher has attempted to include smaller businesses in similar studies. Fifty different business categories are included. Find out where the Swedes worked, shopped and went to church, what papers they read, and which clubs and lodges they joined. What was their journey to America like, their arrival in Moline, and every-day life? Did they ever visit Sweden? These are questions asked by many descendants. Sample descriptions are included. So are first-hand experiences recorded on tape with Swedish Americans in Moline. The work concludes with family histories that cover several generations and reveal the upward movement in society. Sometimes the immigrant trail winds through places in the East, the Midwest and even the West. Many Swedes settled in the farming communities in northwestern Illinois. The connection to Moline then is through their descendants. While the general history of the Swedes in America is relatively well docu-mented, local histories still remain largely untapped. With this richly illustrated publication, Lilly Setterdahl fills one gap on the subject in the Midwest, which was so prominently settled by Swedes.
Vols. 28-30 accompanied by separately published parts with title: Indices and necrology.
Reproduction of the original: The Scandinavian Element in the United States by Kendric Charles Babcock
Between 1880 and 1920, emigration from Sweden to Chicago soared, and the city itself grew remarkably. During this time, the Swedish population in the city shifted from three centrally located ethnic enclaves to neighborhoods scattered throughout the city. As Swedes moved to new neighborhoods, the early enclave-based culture adapted to a progressively more dispersed pattern of Swedish settlement in Chicago and its suburbs. Swedish community life in the new neighborhoods flourished as immigrants built a variety of ethnic churches and created meaningful social affiliations, in the process forging a complex Swedish-American identity that combined their Swedish heritage with their new urban realities. Chicago influenced these Swedes' lives in profound ways, determining the types of jobs they would find, the variety of people they would encounter, and the locations of their neighborhoods. But these immigrants were creative people, and they in turn shaped their urban experience in ways that made sense to them. Swedes arriving in Chicago after 1880 benefited from the strong community created by their predecessors, but they did not hesitate to reshape that community and build new ethnic institutions to make their urban experience more meaningful and relevant. They did not leave Chicago untouched—they formed an expanding Swedish community in the city, making significant portions of Chicago Swedish. This engaging study will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in immigration and Swedish-American history.
This volume is based on the recognition that heritage is popular and popular culture is now readily transformed into heritage whose meanings and myths reshape social life and political and economic realities as well as re-make “tradition.” The papers in this volume consider: What does popular heritage look like? To whom does it speak? Is it active in dissolving class and cultural boundaries or just in reproducing new ones? How do societies manage a heritage that is fluid, immediate and that straddles extremes of serious conflict and hedonistic frivolity? When/under what circumstances is the creation and expression of new cultural forms – popular culture – capable of being transformed into heritage?.
Papers originally presented at a conference held in Chicago in Oct. 1988, sponsored by the Swedish-American Historical Society, and other others.