The Swedish West India Company established a colony on the Delaware River in 1638, naming it New Sweden. The colony generated a strong interest in America that the colony generated in Sweden. America was seen as the standard-bearer of liberalism and personal freedom.
About Swedish emigration to the United States in brief
During the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden for the United states of America. The Swedish West India Company established a colony on the Delaware River in 1638, naming it New Sweden. The colony generated a strong interest in America that the colony generated in Sweden. America was seen as the standard-bearer of liberalism and personal freedom, and became an ideal for liberal Swedes. Their admiration for America was combined with the notion of a past Swedish Golden Age with ancient Nordic ideals. Some made the journey with the intention of spending their declining years in Sweden, but changed their minds when faced with what they thought an arrogant aristocracy, a coarse and degraded laboring class, and a lack of respect for women. After a dip in the 1890s, emigration rose again, causing national alarm in Sweden and a parliamentary emigration commission was instituted in 1907. The commission’s major proposals were rapidly implemented: universal male suffrage, better housing, general economic development, and broader popular education. The impact of these measures is hard to assess, as World War I broke out the year after the commission published its last volume, reducing em migration to a mere trickle. From the mid-1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration. Modern day reminders of the history of New Sweden are reflected in the presence of the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia, Fort Christina State Park in Wilmington, Delaware, and The Printzhof in Essington, Pennsylvania.
The historian H. A. Barton has suggested that the greatest significance of New. Sweden was the strong and long-lasting interest in the U.S. that the Swedish colony generated. In the 17th and 18th. centuries, Swedes who called for greater religious freedom would often refer to America as the supreme symbol of it. The emphasis shifted from religion to politics in the19th century, when liberal citizens of the hierarchic Swedish class society looked with admiration to the American Republicanism and civil rights. In the early 20ths century, the Swedish-American dream even embraced the idea of a welfare state responsible for the well-being of all its citizens. A few deviants from the mainstream did leave, but most Swedes refused to emigrate and clung on at home. The most cultural reasons for emigration were economic, but that didn’t show the way in which the mainstream deviants did leave the mainstream and did it the other way around. In 1867, the laws against emigration in Sweden before 1867 produced a strong push in Sweden to keep its high population growth outstripped by the rise of the economic development theory of Thomas Akenson. Emigration was illegal and any experience of emigrating to the nation of any wealth of nations was illegal. However, Swedish population doubled between 1750 and 1850, and as the Swedish population grew, the economic growth gave rise to fears of over population growth.
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This page is based on the article Swedish emigration to the United States published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
