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The histories of colonial settlement in America are generally presented as uniquely national stories. Yet because these histories involved settlers who crossed oceans, they are inherently transnational and have been important for different groups throughout the world. To understand how settlement histories are used to promote social, political, and commercial relations across national borders, Adam Hjorthén explores the little-known phenomenon of cross-border commemorations.

Focusing on two celebrations of Swedish settlement in America—the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary and the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial—Hjorthén examines a wide variety of sources to demonstrate how cultural leaders, politicians, and businessmen used these events to promote international relations between the United States and Sweden during times of great geopolitical transformation. Cross-Border Commemorations argues that scholarship on public commemoration should expand beyond national borders and engage the shared and contested meanings of history across local, national, and transnational contexts.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large numbers of Swedish immigrants came to Michigan seeking new opportunities in the United States and relief from economic, religious, or political problems at home. In addition to establishing early farming communities, Swedish immigrants worked on railroad construction, mining, fishing, logging, and urban manufacturing. As a result, Swedish Americans made significant contributions to the economic and cultural landscape of Michigan, a history this book explores in engaging and illustrative depth. Swedes in Michigan traces the evolution of hard-working people who valued education and assimilated actively while simultaneously maintaining their cultural ties and institutions. Moving from past to present, the book examines community patterns, family connections, social organizations, exchange programs, ethnic celebrations, and business and technical achievements that have helped Swedes in Michigan maintain a sense of their heritage even as they have adapted to American life.

The revised and expanded edition of Frederick Hale’s Swedes in Wisconsin begins with the story of the state’s first legal Swedish immigrants, a group of six young people and a hunting dog who set sail from Gävle, Sweden, in 1841 and established Wisconsin’s first Swedish settlement, New Uppsala, along Pine Lake in Waukesha County.

Hale describes the mass emigration from Sweden to the Midwest that began during the late 1860s and fundamentally changed both Sweden and the Midwest. During this time more than a million Swedes left their homeland for North America, motivated at least in part by a huge population surge that overtaxed Sweden’s relatively small amount of arable land (agriculture served until the twentieth century as the Swedish economy’s mainstay).

Updates for the new edition include new photos and excerpts from letters Swedish novelist and feminist Fredrika Bremer wrote to her sister while touring the Wisconsin frontier in the autumn of 1850.