Author: Lilly Setterdahl Publisher: Universal-Publishers ISBN: 9781581125825 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
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.
Author: David T. Coopman Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1439635196 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
The history of Rock Island County, once known as the farm implement capital of the world, starts well before that industry sprung up on the Mississippi River at a point where the river runs east to west. Fur trading, farming, mining, milling, and lumber all played a key role in the countys formation. As the railroad moved west, the first rail bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island created a transportation hub and furthered the areas process of industrialization. This volume of vintage pictures looks at the county from the early 1800s, prior to its creation, through the mid-1960s. It illustrates the rich rural influence of the settlements, villages, and townships; the development of the cities and their industries, businesses, and educational and cultural centers; and how the people who worked the fields and factories made use of and enjoyed their leisure time.
Author: David M. Krueger Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452945438 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 181
Book Description
What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community’s and a state’s identity for decades. In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North American origin story, predating Christopher Columbus’s exploration, in which Viking missionaries reached what is now Minnesota in 1362 only to be massacred by Indians. The tale’s credibility was quickly challenged and ultimately undermined by experts, but the myth took hold. Faith in the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity. Accepted and proclaimed as truth, the story of the Rune Stone recast Native Americans as villains. The community used the account as the basis for civic celebrations for years, and advocates for the stone continue to promote its validity despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax. Krueger puts this stubborn conviction in context and shows how confidence in the legitimacy of the stone has deep implications for a wide variety of Minnesotans who embraced it, including Scandinavian immigrants, Catholics, small-town boosters, and those who desired to commemorate the white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862. Krueger demonstrates how the resilient belief in the Rune Stone is a form of civil religion, with aspects that defy logic but illustrate how communities characterize themselves. He reveals something unique about America’s preoccupation with divine right and its troubled way of coming to terms with the history of the continent’s first residents. By considering who is included, who is left out, and how heroes and villains are created in the stories we tell about the past, Myths of the Rune Stone offers an enlightening perspective on not just Minnesota but the United States as well.
Author: Harold Holzer Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0451489012 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 465
Book Description
From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War. In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society. Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.
Author: Lilly Setterdahl
Author: Nils William Olsson
Author: Ernst Wilhelm Olson
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Author: David T. Coopman
Author: James Iverne Dowie
Author: Nathan Edward Goldthwait
Author: David M. Krueger
Author: Harold Holzer
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