THE SCANDINAVIAN MIGRATION FROM LOCAL
AND TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Norwegians on the Prairie: Ethnicity and the Development of the Country
Town.
By Odd S. Lovoll. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006.
xvii + 321 pp. Maps, tables, photos, notes, appendix, and index. $32.95
(cloth).
The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana
Synod, 18601917. By Dag Blanck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2006. x + 256 pp. Tables, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00
(cloth).
The Old Country and the New: Essays on Swedes and America. By H. Arnold
Barton. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. xv + 293 pp.
Tables, photos, illustrations, notes, and index. $55.00 (cloth).
Jon Gjerde
University of California, Berkeley
Recently in the pages of this journal, Matthew Jacobson made a compelling
plea for a greater sensitivity toward the transnational character of the
field of immigration and ethnoracial history. Citing Oscar Handlin and
John F. Kennedy, among others, he stressed the ways in which the field
is inherently transnational, yet how the national has often intruded on
our scholarship. As persuasive as Jacobson's point is regarding the field,
his essay revealed an incomplete appreciation of its historiography. The
work of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Frank
Thistlethwaite, and Marcus Lee Hansen, to cite only a few examples from
which Handlin and Kennedy might have profited, had explicitly transnational
elements. Each in his or her own way attempted to view emigration and
immigration as an integrated process that wed world capitalist development
and the turn to modernity into a comprehensive whole. As scholars have
recently rediscovered the transnational wheel, their understanding of
those who preceded them is often lacking.
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