Summary
A study of identity construction through historical legend.
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.
Author
Jennifer Eastman Attebery, professor emerita of English at Idaho State University, is the author of Pole Raising and Speech Making: Modalities of Swedish-American Summer Celebration and Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience.
Details
- Hardcover
- Pages: 248
- Size 6" x 9"
- Publication Date: 2023, UW Press.
Table of Contents
Preface: Historical Legend Is Living Legend
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Cultural Work of Heritage
Chapter 1: What Is Historical Legend?
Chapter 2: Swedish American Local History Writing
Chapter 3: Reading Texts within Texts
Chapter 4: The Content of Swedish American Historical Legends
Chapter 5: Rhetoric: Community Claims about the Shared Past
Chapter 6: Ostension: Acting on the Shared Past
Chapter 7: Critique: Historical Legend and Local History as Useable Pasts
Coda: Heritage as Emergent Culture
Notes
Works Cited
Index
