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Full-Text Articles in Scandinavian Studies
Scandinavian Immigrant Literature, Christer Lennart Mossberg
Scandinavian Immigrant Literature, Christer Lennart Mossberg
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
When today’s "Midwest” opened to settlers in the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants joined Americans streaming into the area. Eventually, these immigrants constituted almost half the population of the plains and prairies. Although many old country habits and traditions disappeared quickly under the pressure to assimilate, several immigrant groups persisted in using their own languages to record their lives. Scandinavian immigrants left one of the richest records of Western farmlife in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only in their diaries, journals, and ethnic histories, but particularly in their literature. Over eighty novels and short story …