Project MUSE®: Norwegian-American Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Norwegian-American Studies.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1926) through current issue
Latest Articles: Norwegian-American StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Norwegian-American Studies2643-84370078-1983Latest articles in Norwegian-American Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Sámi Reindeer Expedition at Woodland Park in Seattle (1898) as Witnessed Through the Photographs of Anders Beer Wilse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973497
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Anders Beer Wilse and David Kirk, Untitled [Sámi reindeer herders of the Lapland-Yukon Relief Expedition, 1898], March 1898 (title assigned by University of Washington Special Collections staff). University of Washington, Special Collections, Wilse no. 388. The expedition numbered 113 men, women, children, and infants. Some of the Sámi families in Washington and Oregon today (particularly those living in Port Angeles and Poulsbo) are descendants of the original herding families.In that same year, Wilse’s engagement of photography as a profession had a profound shift in focus when he joined with travel photographer David Kirk as a business partner to operate a photography studio in Seattle. The commercial success
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallThe Sámi Reindeer Expedition at Woodland Park in Seattle (1898) as Witnessed Through the Photographs of Anders Beer Wilse2025-10-31text/htmlen-USThe Sámi Reindeer Expedition at Woodland Park in Seattle (1898) as Witnessed Through the Photographs of Anders Beer Wilse2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®162412026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31A Roundtable Discussion of the State of the Field of Norwegian-American Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973498
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What is one of the articles or books written in the field of Norwegian-American studies that has been most influential in your own work? How has it shaped your understanding of the Norwegian-American experience?Ingrid Semmingsen, Veien mot vest. Utvandringen fra Norge til Amerika 1825–1865 (1941) and Utvandringen fra Norge 1865–1915 (1950). Semmingsen’s body of work is a Norwegian national treasure. How to best write the history of Norwegians who emigrated and their relationship with the homeland was much discussed and debated from the early 1900s.It was finally achieved and resolved with Semmingsen’s two pioneer volumes. Her focus is worldwide, but most of the history covers Norwegians in America. Semmingsen
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallA Roundtable Discussion of the State of the Field of Norwegian-American Studies2025-10-31text/htmlen-USA Roundtable Discussion of the State of the Field of Norwegian-American Studies2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®280202026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31A Feminism of Its Own: Revisiting the Scandinavian-American Woman and Home, Circa 1888–1920
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973500
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The Scandinavian-American magazine Woman and Home (Kvinden og Hjemmet) was established in 1888 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by Norwegian-American Ida Hansen, whose aim, as editor, was to give “Scandinavian-borne women . . . knowledge of what was required of those who settled and lived in America . . . [and] help them in their desires to become good citizens.”1 Her venture was a success. For decades the magazine had a circulation of between 60,000 and 83,000, far exceeding that of the largest Norwegian newspaper at that time, the Norwegian-American Skandinaven.2 Clearly, Scandinavian-American women were eager for news of particular concern to themselves.From the beginning, editor Hansen and her team had sought to inform
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallA Feminism of Its Own: Revisiting the Scandinavian-American Woman and Home, Circa 1888–19202025-10-31text/htmlen-USA Feminism of Its Own: Revisiting the Scandinavian-American Woman and Home, Circa 1888–19202025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®1103092026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Remembering Capt. Robert M. Losey, Killed by the Nazis in Norway Eighty-Five Years Ago, the First American Military Casualty in WWII
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973501
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It was the kind of wonderful winter-spring day that we have in Norway in April. There is a good smell from the melting snow, a fragrance of pine needles [and] of moss and wet earth wherever a stony mound juts up out of the snow. . . . And then the American military attaché, Captain Losey, was killed.On the morning of 9 April 1940, Florence Jaffray “Daisy” Harriman, the American minister to Norway, sent an urgent message to her boss in Washington, DC, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, saying that German military forces were invading neutral Norway, exclaiming almost incredulously in a secret cable that Norway was now “at war with Germany!”1Earlier, Harriman had been awakened by a telephone call from the British
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallRemembering Capt. Robert M. Losey, Killed by the Nazis in Norway Eighty-Five Years Ago, the First American Military Casualty in WWII2025-10-31text/htmlen-USRemembering Capt. Robert M. Losey, Killed by the Nazis in Norway Eighty-Five Years Ago, the First American Military Casualty in WWII2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®432582026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Seven Generations: A Century of Norwegian-American History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973502
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Ole Edvart Rölvaag was a young fisherman in stormy Norwegian waters near the Arctic Circle in 1895, when Adolf Bredesen stood up at a meeting in Red Wing, Minnesota, to propose building a Norwegian-American museum. Norwegian-American institutions were not created, Bredesen said, by “some multi-millionaire in the East, some merchant prince, coal baron or oil king, but by the [hard]-handed Norwegian pioneer on the prairies and in the backwoods of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota.”1 It was time to acknowledge the Norwegian pioneers in America by building a museum and an archive that showed what they had achieved. Bredesen proposed that his alma mater, Luther College, should do this by collecting “relics and papers” that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallSeven Generations: A Century of Norwegian-American History2025-10-31text/htmlen-USSeven Generations: A Century of Norwegian-American History2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®1505262026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31200 Years of Norwegian Immigration: Marking a Milestone in the Classroom
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973503
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On the cover of the fall 2024 issue of Vesterheim magazine is an image of fifty-two people standing in the outline of the Restauration ship. This outline, laid out in paving stones in the courtyard of Vesterheim, the National Norwegian-American Museum and Folk Art School, represents the shape and size of the sloop that brought the first organized group of emigrating Norwegians to the United States in 1825.Looking at the photo, one finds it hard to imagine so many people on an overseas voyage on a ship of that size. The image is a testament to the determination and strong convictions of that first group of Norwegians. I showed the picture to my students and asked them what motivated the emigrants to endure such a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmall200 Years of Norwegian Immigration: Marking a Milestone in the Classroom2025-10-31text/htmlen-US200 Years of Norwegian Immigration: Marking a Milestone in the Classroom2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®151102026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America by Bodil Stenseth (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973504
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This is Kari Lie Dorer and Torild Homstad’s translation of the Norwegian book Fru Muus’ Klage: Ekteskapsskandalen som rystet det norske Amerika by Bodil Stenseth (reviewed by me in Norwegian-American Studies 39 [2021]), with further editing and text by Dorer. The subject is Oline Muus versus her husband Bernt Julius Muus. Mr. Muus, founder of St. Olaf College and longtime pastor of Holden congregation near Northfield, Minnesota, was a leader in the Norwegian Lutheran Church. When his wife engaged a lawyer, the young Andrew Ueland, to help her with the legal issues surrounding her inheritance from her father in Norway, a huge scandal ensued. In Norway, the inheritance would have gone to her husband, who owned it as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallMuus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America by Bodil Stenseth (review)2025-10-31text/htmlen-USMuus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America by Bodil Stenseth (review)2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®69952026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography ed. by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973505
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W. J. T. Mitchell’s call to shift the study of landscape as a genre of pictorial representation to a medium of cultural transformation by changing the understanding of the term landscape from a noun to a verb—to landscape—encapsulates the essays exploring the transnational relations between Norwegian and American landscape photography from the second half of the nineteenth century in the lavishly illustrated Across the West and Toward the North.1 Published to accompany the traveling exhibition of the same title, the collective aim of the essays is to reflect on the historical, aesthetic, and political affinities between landscape photography of the frontiers of the American West and Northern Norway. Through four
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallAcross the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography ed. by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad (review)2025-10-31text/htmlen-USAcross the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography ed. by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad (review)2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®114202026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Colonel Hans Christian Heg and the Norwegian American Experience by Odd S. Lovoll (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973506
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As the bicentennial of organized Norwegian migration to North America is celebrated in 2025, it is a good time to read the first full-length biography of one of Norwegian America’s enduring heroes, Civil War Colonel Hans Christian Heg of the Fifteenth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment (the “Scandinavian Regiment”), who gave his life in service to the Union at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. The book is authored by one of the leading scholars of Norwegian-American history, Odd S. Lovoll.In the preface, Lovoll discusses the exigence of his project: the vandalism, decapitation, and removal of the Heg statue in Madison on 23 June 2020 following George Floyd protests near the Wisconsin State Capitol. The statue
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallColonel Hans Christian Heg and the Norwegian American Experience by Odd S. Lovoll (review)2025-10-31text/htmlen-USColonel Hans Christian Heg and the Norwegian American Experience by Odd S. Lovoll (review)2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®73642026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Reflections on the (Bi-)Centennial Celebrations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973507
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The year 2025 commemorates a double anniversary for Norwegian Americans. It marks the bicentennial of the first organized emigration from Norway to North America and the centennial of the founding of the Norwegian American Historical Association. Both events have proven to be significant historical events not only in the United States and Canada, where the majority of the emigrants settled, but also in Norway. Many of those who celebrated the centennial of the 1825 arrival of the small sloop Restauration were themselves immigrants, giving them a close personal connection to the migration experience. Desiring that the struggles and successes of the Norwegian immigrants in the new country be remembered, the idea
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallReflections on the (Bi-)Centennial Celebrations2025-10-31text/htmlen-USReflections on the (Bi-)Centennial Celebrations2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®85522026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31Pastor Claus L. Clausen’s Backstage Biography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973508
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Pastor Claus L. Clausen (1820–1892), originally from Denmark, features in practically every account of early Norwegian immigration to the United States. His varied career continues to fascinate Norwegian-American historiography even today.1 This is hardly surprising. Shortly after immigrating in 1843, Clausen became the pastor of the first Norwegian congregation to be organized in America, in the Muskego settlement in the territory of Wisconsin. For the next forty-odd years, he served Norwegian immigrants in a multitude of ways and in ever-new locations. In the course of his impressive career, he founded twenty congregations, initiated two journals, founded two synods, led a company of settlers to found the town of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/802/image/coversmallPastor Claus L. Clausen’s Backstage Biography2025-10-31text/htmlen-USPastor Claus L. Clausen’s Backstage Biography2025-10-312025TWOProject MUSE®916992026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-10-31