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Acculturation Among Swedish Immigrants In Kansas And Nebraska, 1870-1900, Terrence Jon Lindell

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary observers and many historians have maintained that Swedish immigrants rapidly assimilated into American society. This dissertation examines this conclusion by focusing on rural Swedish settlements in the Great Plains--the Lindsborg community in McPherson and Saline counties in Kansas and Burt, Phelps, Polk, and Saunders counties In Nebraska.

These immigrant communities, all founded in the two decades following the Civil War, typically were estabIished by Swedes who had spent some time in states east of the Great Plains and had thus already begun to assimilate. All of the settlements developed congregations of various denominations--either through religious schism or immigration by …