Jennifer Eastman Attebery - Böcker

Spanning more than 100 years of Swedish American local history in the Midwest and the West, Jennifer Eastman Attebery’s thorough examination of nearly 300 historical legends explores how Swedish Americans employ these narratives in creating, debating, and maintaining group identity. She demonstrates that historical legends can help us better understand how immigrant groups in general, and Swedish Americans in particular, construct and perpetuate a sense of ethnicity as broader notions of nationality, race, and heritage shift over time. The legends Swedish Americans tell about their past are both similar to and distinct from those of others who migrated westward; they participated in settler colonialism while maintaining a sense of their specific, Swedish ethnicity. Unlike racial minority groups, Swedish Americans could claim membership in a majority white community without abandoning their cultural heritage. Their legends and local histories reflect that positioning. Attebery reveals how Swedish American legends are embedded within local history writing, how ostension and rhetoric operate in historical legends, and how vernacular local history writing works in tandem with historical legends to create a common message about a communal past. This impeccably researched study points to ways in which legends about the past possess qualities unique to their subgenre yet can also operate similarly to contemporary legends in their social impact.

Before the turn of the twentieth century, many Swedish men emigrated to the American Rockies as itinerant laborers, drawn by the region’s developing industries. Single Swedish women ventured west, too, and whole families migrated, settling into farm communities. By 1920, one-fifth of all Swedish immigrants were living in the West.  In Up in the Rocky Mountains, Jennifer Eastman Attebery offers a new perspective on Swedish immigrants’ experiences in Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico from 1880 to 1917 by interpreting their letters home. Considering more than three hundred letters, Attebery analyzes their storytelling, repetitive language, traditional phrasing, and metaphoric images. Recognizing the letters’ power as a folk form, Attebery sees in them the writers’ relationships back in Sweden as well as their encounters with religious and labor movements, regionalism, and nationalism in their new country.  By defining personal letters as a vernacular genre, Attebery provides a model for discerning immigrants’ shared culture in correspondence collections. By studying their words, she brings to life small Swedish communities throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Jennifer Eastman Attebery is professor of English and director of American studies at Idaho State University.