Swedish-American Borderlands might not be easy to imagine at first, but the authors in the edited collection of the same name persuasively argue for it as a productive interdisciplinary lens. Swedish-American Borderlands re-examines links and relationships between Sweden and the United States, a topic revisited many times throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but this time through the perspective of borderlands. A collaborative project between scholars in Europe and the United States, the collection aims to reconceptualize Swedish American relations by focusing on physical and conceptual “contacts, crossings, and convergences” (p. 1). The authors expand the focus of Swedish American history beyond the traditional emphases on migration and ethnicity, New Sweden, and the 1840–1920 migrations to America.
In their introduction, editors Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén provide an extensive literature review of the three main historiographies informing their collection: previous scholarly approaches to Swedish American relations (focusing on Swedish...
