Tuesday, October 06, 2015

SWEDISH EMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

For millenia, the continent we know as North America was occupied by native Americans.

But after 1604, things started to go really downhill for the native Americans, as white settlers came from Europe, to settle, to farm the land, to trade, and to eventually ethnically cleanse the native Americans in order to take their lands.

Sweden was one of many nations that supplied immigrants into the United States, well over a million :
Immigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a part of the economic and social transformation that affected both Europe and North America, when between 1850 and 1950 some fifty million Europeans settled in non-European areas. The mass exodus of some 1.3 million Swedes to the United States, often young and healthy men and women, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due to the economic and social circumstances in Sweden.

...Minnesota became the most Swedish of all states, with Swedish-Americans constituting more than 12 percent of Minnesota's population in 1910. In some areas, such as Chisago or Isanti counties on the Minnesota countryside north and northwest of Minneapolis, Swedish-Americans made up close to 70 percent of the population. If Minnesota became the most Swedish state in the union, the city of Chicago, was the Swedish-American capital. In 1910, more than 100,000 Swedish-Americans resided in Chicago, which meant that about 10 percent of all Swedish-Americans lived there. At the turn of the century, Chicago was also the second largest Swedish city in the world; only Stockholm had more Swedish inhabitants than Chicago.

[source : Swedish Immigration to North America, Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, Augustana College, https://www.augustana.edu/general-information/swenson-center-/swedish-american-immigration-history, Accessed 6t October 2015]

So the challenge for all those anti-immigrant persons out there is: what ever happened to the native Americans of Minnesota? (Clue: they were slaughtered.)

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