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Between 1821 and 1920, the U.S. witnessed a significant wave of Scandinavian immigration. Within this period, Sweden was the dominant contributor. While its population stood at 5,847,637 in 1920, Sweden accounted for a staggering 1,144,607 immigrants, making up 53.5% of the total Scandinavian immigrants to the US during this era.
In the 1800s–1900s, the Lutheran State Church supported the Swedish government by opposing both emigration and the clergy's efforts recommending sobriety. This escalated to a point where its priests even were persecuted by the church for preaching sobriety, and the reactions of many congregation members to that contributed to an inspiration ...
Evjen, John O. Scandinavian Immigrants in New York 1630–1674 (Genealogical Pub. Co., Baltimore, 1972) Flom, George T. A History of Norwegian Immigration to the United States: From the Earliest Beginning Down to the Year 1848 (Iowa City, 1909) Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. The Scandinavian American Family Album (Oxford University Press ...
The Swedes and the Swedish Settlements in North America 2 vols. (Lund, 1943) Nelson, Robert J. If We Could Only Come to America... A Story of Swedish Immigrants in the Midwest. (Sunflower U. Press, 2004) Norman, Hans, and Harald Runblom. Transatlantic Connections: Nordic Migration to the New World After 1800 (1988). Olson, Anita Ruth.
Many immigrants during the early 1800s sought religious freedom. From the mid-1800s however, the driving forces behind Norwegian immigration to the United States were agricultural disasters which led to poverty , from the European Potato Failure of the 1840s to the Famine of 1866–68 .
The final phase of colonial immigration, from 1760 to 1820, became dominated by free settlers and was marked by a huge increase in British immigrants to North America and the United States in particular. In that period, 871,000 Europeans immigrated to the Americas, of which over 70% were British (including Irish in that category).
"New immigration" was a term from the late 1880s that refers to the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (areas that previously sent few immigrants). [62] The great majority came through Ellis Island in New York, thus making the Northeast a major target of settlement.
The sale of lands was another reason for migration, with many Danes becoming farmers in Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas. During the 1870s, almost half of all Danish immigrants settled in the US with their families, but by the 1890s, family immigration accounted for only 25% of the total. Many of these immigrants eventually returned to Denmark.