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"On Midsummer Eve, 1865, more than 30 Finnish and Sami immigrants disembarked from a Great Lakes ship to a place called Hancock, Michigan. At the time, Hancock consisted of nothing more than a small cluster of humble buildings, but it was here, on the outskirts of mid-19th-century civilization, that Finnish settlement in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP) took root. Much to the surprise of these new Americans, Midsummer was not a religious holiday marked by feasts in celebration of the season's prolonged sunlight. Rather, the newcomers were immediately hastened into the bowels of the earth to extract copper in pursuit of the American Dream. In short order, hardworking Finnish immigrants became reputable miners, lumberjacks, farmers, maids, and commercial fishermen. A century and a half later, the UP boasts the largest Finnish population outside of the motherland and sustains the determined spirit the Finns call sisu--an influence that remains palpable in all 15 UP counties."--
Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America reinterprets Finnish experiences in North America by connecting them to the transnational processes of settler colonial conquest, far-settlement, elimination of natives, and capture of terrestrial spaces. Rather than merely exploring whether the idea of Finns as a different kind of immigrant is a myth, this book challenges it in many ways. It offers an analysis of the ways in which this myth manifests itself, why it has been upheld to this day, and most importantly how it contributes to settler colonialism in North America and beyond. The authors in this volume apply multidisciplinary perspectives in revealing the various levels of Finnish involvement in settler colonialism. In their chapters, authors seek to understand the experiences and representations of Finns in North American spatial projects, in territorial expansion and integration, and visions of power. They do so by analyzing how Finns reinvented their identities and acted as settlers, participated in the production of settler colonial narratives, as well as benefitted and took advantage of settler colonial structures. Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America aims to challenge traditional histories of Finnish migration, in which Finns have typically been viewed almost in isolation from the broader American context, not to mention colonialism. The book examines the diversity of roles, experiences, and narrations of and by Finns in the histories of North America by employing the settler colonial analytical framework.
This succinct yet comprehensive volume outlines the contributions and culture of Minnesota's Finnish Americans, perhaps best known for their cooperative ventures, their political involvement, and, of course, their saunas.
Presents an illustrated A-Z reference containing more than 300 entries related to immigration to North America, including people, places, legislation, and more.
Three Finnish siblings head for the logging fields of nineteenth-century America in the New York Times–bestselling author’s “commanding historical epic” (Washington Post). Born into a farm family, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and Aino—are raised to maintain their grit and resiliency in the face of hardship. This lesson in sisu takes on special meaning when their father is arrested by imperial Russian authorities, never to be seen again. Lured by the prospects of the Homestead Act, Ilmari and Matti set sail for America, while young Aino, feeling betrayed and adrift after her Marxist cell is exposed, follows soon after. The brothers establish themselves among a logging community in southern Washington, not far from the Columbia River. In this New World, they each find themselves—Ilmari as the family’s spiritual rock; Matti as a fearless logger and entrepreneur; and Aino as a fiercely independent woman and union activist who is willing to make any sacrifice for the cause that sustains her. Layered with fascinating historical detail, this novel bears witness to the stump-ridden fields that the loggers—and the first waves of modernity—leave behind. At its heart, Deep River explores the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.
Late-arriving immigrants during the Great Migration, Finns were, comparatively speaking, a relatively small immigrant group, with about 350,000 immigrants arriving prior to World War II. Nevertheless, because of their geographic concentration in the Upper Midwest in particular, their impact was pronounced. They differed from many other new immigrant groups in a number of ways, including the fact that theirs is not an Indo-European language, and many old-country cultural and social features reflect their geographic location in Europe, at the juncture of East and West. A fresh and up-to-date analysis of Finnish Americans, this insightful volume lays the groundwork for exploring this unique culture through a historical context, followed by an overview of the overall composition and settlement patterns of these newcomers. The authors investigate the vivid ethnic organizations Finns created, as well as the cultural life they sought to preserve and enhance while fitting into their new homeland. Also explored are the complex dimensions of Finnish-American political and religious life, as well as the exodus of many radical leftists to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s. Through the lens of multiculturalism, transnationalism, and whiteness studies, the authors of this volume present a rich portrait of this distinctive group.
This book introduces a new and still emerging theoretical framework for understanding language shift and uses this approach to explore a range of minority language communities in the United States. To date, approaches to language shift have typically relied on explaining the process through descriptive sociolinguistic models, i.e., how the community first becomes bilingual in both the majority and minority languages and then eventually shifts entirely to the majority language. The contributions in this volume instead attribute shift to a change from local control of tightly interconnected 'horizontal' institutions within a community to more external or 'vertical' control of those increasingly autonomous institutions outside the community; in short, language shift is driven by specific changes in community structure. In addition, unlike previous approaches to language shift, the one proposed here is generalizable. Following an introduction to the theory, the main five chapters in the book offer case studies of individual language communities, in different contexts and different periods. The final three chapters of the book take a broader perspective, looking beyond the United States: two leading specialists in the field provide critical commentaries on the theoretical approach and offer refinements to a theory of language shift, before a concluding chapter draws together the findings of the case studies and reflections on the commentaries. The volume will appeal to researchers and students in the fields of language revitalization, community studies, sociolinguistics, and social history.
In the early 1930s, approximately 6,500 Finns from Canada and the United States moved to Soviet Karelia, on the border of Finland, to build a Finnish workers’ society. They were recruited by the Soviet leadership for their North American mechanical and lumber expertise, their familiarity with the socialist cause, and their Finnish language and ethnicity. By 1936, however, Finnish culture and language came under attack and ethnic Finns became the region’s primary targets in the Stalinist Great Terror. Building That Bright Future relies on the personal letters and memoirs of these Finnish migrants to build a history of everyday life during a transitional period for both North American socialism and Soviet policy. Highlighting the voices of men, women, and children, the book follows the migrants from North America to the Soviet Union, providing vivid descriptions of daily life. Samira Saramo brings readers into personal contact with Finnish North Americans and their complex and intimate negotiations of self and belonging. Through letters and memoirs, Building That Bright Future explores the multiple strategies these migrants used to make sense of their rapidly shifting positions in the Soviet hierarchy and the relationships that rooted them to multiple places and times.
"Although it was the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware River valley, the New Sweden colony has long been ignored by American colonial historians. To right this omission, and to mark the 350th anniversary of the founding of the New Sweden colony, the University of Delaware sponsored an international conference, "New Sweden in America: Scandinavian Pioneers and Their Legacy" in March of 1988. This event brought together twenty-eight scholars from Sweden, Finland, and the United States who represented several fields, including history, anthropology, and geography. The conference papers, collected in New Sweden in America, present the first look at the New Sweden colony since the advent of modern historical methods." "The essays in this volume examine the economic and social lives of a political entity, as well as its political structures. The topics discussed include an examination of the European environment from which the colonial venture came, the colonists' relations with the Native Americans, and the Swedish and Finnish settlers' adaptation to colonial life. The essays depict seventeenth-century Sweden as it emerged from its traditional ways and isolation into the dynamic world of Western European international politics and trade, and the failed attempts to bring European mercantilist policies to New Sweden." "The fascinating stories of the trade between the Swedish and Dutch settlers and the Susquehannock and Lenni Lenape Indians, the development of pidgin languages to facilitate the trade, the devout Lutheran religious observations of the colonists, and the introduction of Finnish construction methods (especially the log cabin) are all described in this volume. To encourage further scholarship in this field, the contributors identify topics for future study and delineate where original colonial documents may be found on both sides of the Atlantic."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved