ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Norwegian immigrants to the USA and the process of community building which took place in an interplay between their Norwegian cultural heritage and their encounter with US society. In most cases, scholars of Norwegian immigration history have focused on the development of a Norwegian-American identity and culture in its own right and not as a consequence of the encounter between Norwegian immigrants and other ethnic groups in the USA. In a predominantly rural-to-rural migration from a country which still was very agricultural at the end of the nineteenth century to the vast expanses of the Upper Midwest, Norwegian immigrants could retain their local identity in homogeneous rural settlements. Rural Norwegian immigrants based their identity on strong ties to specific rural home districts in Norway, to the land, kinship, and religion. Norwegian Americans were, along with Anglo-Saxon groups and Germans, representatives of privileged groups in American society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based on their racial credentials. Consequently, non-Norwegians positioned Norwegian immigrants and their offspring in the USA in the ethnoracial hierarchy of their host society.
