Review by Choice Review
Brrndal (Univ. of Southern Denmark) has undertaken what is obviously a labor of love. Using newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and census and electoral data, he has produced a serious tome covering the political experience of immigrant Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes in Wisconsin at the turn of the 20th century. The amount of information collected is impressive and contributes greatly to a modern understanding of the social and political bent of these first-generation residents of the Badger State. Brrndal is particularly interested in the Scandinavian influence upon the Robert LaFollette-led Progressive Movement of the early 1900s. Notably, this look at ethnic public proclivities is much more interesting than many previous attempts at Wisconsin's ethnic history, such as Kathleen Conzen's Immigrant Milwaukee (1976), which relied too heavily on sheer statistics. Brrndal, by contrast, has attempted to bolster the text with letters and stories about persons such as Kristoffer Skauge, an ill-fated migrant from Norway, along with the personal papers of Norwegian-born Congressman Nils Haugen, a prominent Progressive of the era. This is helpful in humanizing and enlivening the scholarly text. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. K. Hauser Marquette University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
