The editors of this work of collected essays note that because Iceland is a small country, Icelanders often prefer to judge themselves by per capita figures, rather than gross figures. On a per capita basis, there may be more written on Icelandic immigrants in North America than any other North American ethnic group. Only fifteen to sixteen thousand people migrated from Iceland in the period 1870 to 1914, but that comprised 20 percent of the island's total population. Most of the contributors to this book are from Iceland, and most of the contributions were originally written in Icelandic before translation into flawless English. For a country that small to produce so much high-quality scholarship on this topic is quite remarkable.
The introduction summarizes the basic contours of the historical migration and settlement patterns of the Icelanders in North America. The largest concentration of Icelanders was in Manitoba, specifically in New...
