"Schultz's book is a brilliant, state-of-the-art interdisciplinary study that expands, by application to a particular case, the various scholarly arguments about the ways cultural traditions, histories, and memories are invented or projected"¦It will, I think, give rise to imitation, as its method, scope and depth are all exemplary."—Joseph T. Skerrett Jr., MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States)
"Shultz makes a stunning contribution to social history, cultural studies, and ethnic studies. Her examination of the 1925 Norwegian-American Immigration Centennial demonstrates the ways in which seemingly small and commonplace cultural events can encode enormously important larger meanings. Drawing deftly on a broad range of sophisticated research"¦Schultz delineates the dynamism of ethnic identity in definitive fashion. Rather than a static inheritance from the past, ethnicity emerges in her account as something re-created anew every day in the context of present needs and desires. A model of careful and creative scholarship."—George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego