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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.
The size of the Swedish-American community in 1865 is estimated at 25,000 people, a figure soon to be surpassed by the yearly Swedish immigration. By 1890, the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000, with immigration peaking in 1869 and again in 1887. [43] Most of this influx settled in the North.
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 .
During the Weichselian glaciation, almost all of Scandinavia was buried beneath a thick permanent sheet of ice and the Stone Age was delayed in this region.Some valleys close to the watershed were indeed ice-free around 30 000 years B.P. Coastal areas were ice-free several times between 75 000 and 30 000 years B.P. and the final expansion towards the late Weichselian maximum took place after ...
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.
A later recession during the 1860s and famine further drove Scandinavians to emigrate. Although immigration to the United States decreased during the American Civil War, a significant wave again left during the 1880s. By the 1920s, the number of Scandinavian immigrants had decreased greatly, stopping almost entirely during the Great Depression ...
The prehistory of Greenland is a story of repeated waves of immigration from the islands north of the North American mainland. (The population of those islands are thought to have descended, in turn, from inhabitants of Siberia who migrated into North America through Beringia thousands of years ago.) Because of Greenland's remoteness and ...
These immigrants settled predominantly in the Midwest, particularly in states like Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin, in similarity with other Nordic and Scandinavian Americans. Populations also grew in the Pacific Northwest in the states of Oregon and Washington at the turn of the twentieth century.