Project MUSE®: Swedish-American Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Swedish-American Studies.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1950) through current issue
Latest Articles: Swedish-American StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Swedish-American Studies2997-4046 2997-4038Latest articles in Swedish-American Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975742
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I was born at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, Washington. And it’s not just because my name ends in -strom. This is something many natives of the Puget Sound area can say, as more babies are currently born at Swedish Hospital than at any other hospital in the state.1 This hospital with a curious name and immigrant origins over a century ago has grown to become one of the leading regional healthcare providers. It is just one example of dozens of hospitals and related services that were founded by Swedish immigrants across the country.This volume of Swedish-American Studies begins with a Photo Feature of images from another such hospital, Swedish Hospital in Chicago (formerly Swedish Covenant Hospital), which recently
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallFrom the Editor2025-11-26text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®186822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Photo Feature: Swedish Hospital, Chicago
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975743
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This summer Swedish Hospital, a part of Endeavor Health, in Chicago unveiled a history wall exhibit in the second-floor foyer of Galter Medical Pavilion. The team who curated this exhibit included Janis Anderson Rueping, retired vice president of quality at Swedish Covenant Hospital, and Marit Johnson Awes, director of operations and administration for Covenant Ministries of Benevolence, the former holding company for the hospital and bridge with the Evangelical Covenant Church. Both have deep roots with the hospital that go back decades, and both were graduates of North Park University just down Foster Avenue from the hospital. The two were also in consultation with Andrew Meyer, archivist at North Park, who
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallPhoto Feature: Swedish Hospital, Chicago2025-11-26text/htmlen-USPhoto Feature: Swedish Hospital, Chicago2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®302982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Heritage Fiction and Folk Narratives: The Swedish-American Example of Lillian Budd
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975744
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She read then of the pain, the inner turmoil, her father had known on tearing himself from his homeland, on coming to a land of strangers. It was written in the third person, but Sigrid knew it was her father’s heartache. As she read, the others also knew. Ridicule was the thing that had hurt most. “A green Swede,” he had been; that name calling had hurt him more than the chicanery which had cost him his job and friends in Geneva, more than the cunning which had cheated him of rightful earnings, not once, but time and time again. Ridicule was the knife to stab into an immigrant’s heart and make it bleed.In this passage from April Harvest, Lillian Budd describes a fictive short story by Swedish migrant to Chicago
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallHeritage Fiction and Folk Narratives: The Swedish-American Example of Lillian Budd2025-11-26text/htmlen-USHeritage Fiction and Folk Narratives: The Swedish-American Example of Lillian Budd2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®770442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Emigrant Letters and the Narration of Memory, Continuity, and Identity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975745
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In an hour we were out of sight of land, we had seen our fatherland for the last time. Oh, what a sight!The quote above is from Samuel Magnus Hill.1 Hill was born into a poor rural family in the Swedish county of Östergötland in 1851. In 1868, the family emigrated to America on the steamship SS City of Limerick. At the same time, they changed their name from Samuelsson to Hill. They were not alone in their decision. Between 1851 and 1930, over a million Swedes crossed the Atlantic. Many of them, like the Samuelsson-Hill family, traveled with hopes of a better future, but this also meant that they had to relate to their experiences in Sweden.This article’s point of departure is to understand emigration experiences
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallEmigrant Letters and the Narration of Memory, Continuity, and Identity2025-11-26text/htmlen-USEmigrant Letters and the Narration of Memory, Continuity, and Identity2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®894302026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Immigrants into Loyal Citizens: The Work to Americanize the Scandinavian Immigrant Working Class in Two Harbors, Minnesota, 1915–1919
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975746
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Upon the United States’ entry into the First World War in April 1917, a wave of nationalism swept the country. The heightened nationalist sentiment was in part a result of, on the one hand, a coordinated political effort during 1915 and 1916 that was intended to counter tensions between immigrants and native-born Americans and, on the other hand, social unrest rooted in the hardening class conflicts. The work to Americanize and deradicalize the immigrant working class had an impact nationwide, but the Americanization effort in Minnesota, with its large Scandinavian- and German-born populations, became particularly intense and created a breeding ground for xenophobia and a distrust of immigrants and their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallImmigrants into Loyal Citizens: The Work to Americanize the Scandinavian Immigrant Working Class in Two Harbors, Minnesota, 1915–19192025-11-26text/htmlen-USImmigrants into Loyal Citizens: The Work to Americanize the Scandinavian Immigrant Working Class in Two Harbors, Minnesota, 1915–19192025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®1246982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Experiencing Swedish Identity Through Anglophone Sound at the Way Out West Festival in Göteborg
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975747
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Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, popular music megafestivals have become increasingly transnational in scope, featuring acts and drawing audiences from across the world. This is especially true in Europe, where the greatly expanded European Union has drawn several previously disjointed economies into a single market that ensures the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital across its various internal national borders.1 As a result, artists and their entire supporting groups (sound technicians, equipment managers, lighting engineers, etc.) as well as the myriad adjacent service workers (transportation, security, food service, waste management, etc.) who put on these large-scale events
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallExperiencing Swedish Identity Through Anglophone Sound at the Way Out West Festival in Göteborg2025-11-26text/htmlen-USExperiencing Swedish Identity Through Anglophone Sound at the Way Out West Festival in Göteborg2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®878362026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Swedish Hospitals in the United States
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975748
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Like many immigrant groups, the Swedes who came to the United States founded numerous hospitals to serve their own medical needs as well as those of their neighbors. The annotated list below is more representative than exhaustive, as many of these institutions were also part of specialized services for elderly people, orphans, or long-term care for disabled people. Some of these institutions were short-lived, while others continue to the present day, whether as independent or merged institutions or having been subsumed into larger hospital conglomerates.The founding of hospitals in the United States by Swedish immigrants was a continuation of a phenomenon of religious and philanthropic investment in health care
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallSwedish Hospitals in the United States2025-11-26text/htmlen-USSwedish Hospitals in the United States2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®834822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Quality of Mercy: Swedish Covenant Hospital and Covenant Home, 1886–1961
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975749
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When the story begins more than a century ago, Chicago needed a ministry of mercy. The city was growing rapidly—much too rapidly—and although mercy lived in human hearts and in the white cottages and the stone mansions beginning to line the straight wide streets, it was as yet too personal to deal with the massive misery of the thousands of young strangers who kept tumbling in from everywhere. There were easterners fleeing from who knows what bleak fate and there were immigrants and gold-seekers and debtors and derelicts all converging upon the new capital of the west.Sickness and death were rampant. Epidemic disease was a demon no doctor could exorcise, and with frequent communications with the East and little
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallQuality of Mercy: Swedish Covenant Hospital and Covenant Home, 1886–19612025-11-26text/htmlen-USQuality of Mercy: Swedish Covenant Hospital and Covenant Home, 1886–19612025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®700802026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Swedish-American Historical Society and North Park University: A Mutual Relationship
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975750
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For over seventy-five years, the campus of North Park University in Chicago has been home to the Swedish-American Historical Society (SAHS). Founded in Chicago in 1948 as the Swedish Pioneer Historical Society, it formally changed its name in 1983. This brief historical narrative describes the origins and nature of the relationship through the decades, the character and mission of the society, its contributions—visible and intangible—to the life of a vital academic institution, and its gratitude for a home with benefits of place and support that have allowed it to flourish. It is to be hoped that given this history, the relationship will continue in mutually acknowledged and beneficial ways.The migration to North
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallThe Swedish-American Historical Society and North Park University: A Mutual Relationship2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Swedish-American Historical Society and North Park University: A Mutual Relationship2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®222652026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Swedish-American Bibliography 2024
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975751
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Notes on abbreviations and format: SAG is Swedish American Genealogist and SAS is Swedish-American Studies. Entries are listed by the following classifications: Books and Pamphlets; Articles; and Dissertations, Theses, and Academic Papers. When available, ISBN and ISSN numbers are listed.Readers are encouraged to send information concerning omissions and new publications to the bibliography editor: Ulf Jonas Björk, jbjork@iu.edu or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallSwedish-American Bibliography 20242025-11-26text/htmlen-USSwedish-American Bibliography 20242025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®393972026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Swedish Jazz in the United States: Swede and Cool by Mischa van Kan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975752
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This contribution to the Routledge book series Transnational Studies in Jazz explores the reception and understanding of Swedish jazz in the United States. Based on a doctoral dissertation, Swedish Jazz in the United States is a historical study of the period 1947–1963 when Sweden was uniquely positioned to adopt, record, and perform jazz. Data compiled by author Mischa van Kan shows that a “Swedish wave” of jazz records issued in the United States peaked in 1953, declined toward the end of the decade, and ultimately lasted for about fifteen years as popular music at first shifted to rock ’n’ roll and then pop (the end point of the study coincides with the release of the Beatles’ first album).The rationale for the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallSwedish Jazz in the United States: Swede and Cool by Mischa van Kan (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USSwedish Jazz in the United States: Swede and Cool by Mischa van Kan (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®104052026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Oland: Sveriges glömda Hollywoodstjärna by Kim Khavar Fahlstedt (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975753
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It is now over thirty years ago that Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map was published, a groundbreaking study on Elvira Notari (1875–1946), Italy’s first woman filmmaker. Her sixty features and a hundred documentaries are lost, leaving mostly fragments—something that Bruno turned into a triumph of historiographical scholarship. Just as in the case of black holes in the firmament, one gets an image of the thing itself through what is lit up around it.Kim Khavar Fahlstedt’s task in Oland: Sveriges glömda Hollywoodstjärna is not quite as daunting. After all, the over one hundred films in which actor Warner Oland participated between 1918 and 1938 are not entirely lost, but much is, and as the book’s title
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallOland: Sveriges glömda Hollywoodstjärna by Kim Khavar Fahlstedt (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USOland: Sveriges glömda Hollywoodstjärna by Kim Khavar Fahlstedt (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®99942026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Lois W. Banner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975754
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In historiography, the history of feminism is divided into waves. The first wave ended around 1920, when women in many Western countries had won suffrage, and the second wave began in the 1960s. This periodization can make it seem as though no feminist advances occurred in between. However, as clarified by Lois W. Banner’s biography of the Swedish film star Greta Garbo (1905–1990), this was not the case.Greta Gustafsson, who upon her breakthrough changed her name to Garbo, was a Swedish woman from working-class neighborhoods in Stockholm who made a remarkable social ascent and achieved world fame. After her professional career, she lived another half-century in a worldwide jet-set lifestyle, constantly pursued by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallIdeal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Lois W. Banner (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USIdeal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Lois W. Banner (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®105482026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Hip Heritage and Museum Practices in Contemporary Hybrid Markets by Lizette Gradén and Tom O’Dell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975755
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Lizette Gradén and Tom O’Dell’s Hip Heritage and Museum Practices in Contemporary Hybrid Markets examines how museums navigate the pressures—both cultural and economic—of an increasingly globalized and hybridized market. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted in Sweden and the United States between 2014 and 2022, the book presents rich empirical material drawn from seven museums—five in Sweden (Skokloster Castle just south of Uppsala, the Hallwyl Palace in Stockholm, Kulturen in Lund, Kulturens Östarp in rural Scania, and the Museum of Movements in Malmö) and two in the United States (the National Nordic Museum in Seattle and the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis). The book consists of six
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallHip Heritage and Museum Practices in Contemporary Hybrid Markets by Lizette Gradén and Tom O’Dell (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USHip Heritage and Museum Practices in Contemporary Hybrid Markets by Lizette Gradén and Tom O’Dell (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®134092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Imorgon är jag långt härifrån: Ett avskedsbrev till USA. by Martin Gelin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975756
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The 2024 presidential election in the United States generated intense interest in Sweden, resulting in a number of books about the United States by experts in the field. Many of them were by foreign correspondents who lived in America for extended periods of time. One such book is Imorgon är jag långt härifrån (Tomorrow I will be far away from here) by Martin Gelin, who for more than twenty years reported from North America for major Swedish media outlets, covering politics, popular culture, and the nation as a whole. The range of topics covered by him is summed up in an anecdote told in the book where Gelin’s answer to an American colleague’s question about what he is supposed to report on is simply “America.” In
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallImorgon är jag långt härifrån: Ett avskedsbrev till USA. by Martin Gelin (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USImorgon är jag långt härifrån: Ett avskedsbrev till USA. by Martin Gelin (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®65182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy by Ulf Zander (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975757
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Raoul Wallenberg and his rescue operation in Budapest are central to the way that Sweden remembers the Holocaust. To illustrate, one of the Swedish Holocaust Museum’s three exhibitions is dedicated to Wallenberg: his life, time in Budapest, and disappearance.1 While Wallenberg is now celebrated as a symbol of wartime humanitarianism, and of Sweden itself, this has not always been the case. In Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy, historian Ulf Zander explains how the diplomat obtained his current hero status. Zander analyzes Wallenberg’s legacy and aims to place it in the political, ideological, and what the author calls the “history-cultural” context of postwar Sweden, Hungary, and the United States. He also studies
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallRaoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy by Ulf Zander (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USRaoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy by Ulf Zander (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®100672026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Slummen får sin hämnd: Författaren Carl Sandburg och drömmen om ett demokratiskt Amerika by Pierre Schori (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975758
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In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes stressed the impact of Carl Sandburg’s free verse as the teenager took his first steps to become a poet. An early attempt even celebrated this “guiding star”: “Carl Sandburg’s poems / Fall on the white pages of his books / Like blood-clots of song / From the wounds of humanity. / I know a lover of life sings / When Carl Sandburg sings. / I know a lover of all the living / sings then.”1 In 1927, when Hughes was a major voice in the Harlem Renaissance, and after Sandburg had been introduced in Swedish by the Finnish poet Elmer Diktonius, people walking through a Stockholm park could spot two young working-class men without formal education, sitting together
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/885/image/coversmallSlummen får sin hämnd: Författaren Carl Sandburg och drömmen om ett demokratiskt Amerika by Pierre Schori (review)2025-11-26text/htmlen-USSlummen får sin hämnd: Författaren Carl Sandburg och drömmen om ett demokratiskt Amerika by Pierre Schori (review)2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®103292026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26