by Karl Nelson
A Community Transplanted: The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, 1835-1915 by Robert Ostergren. University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
My grandfather, Curtiss D. Johnson, had a deep interest in his Swedish heritage. Many years ago, he gave me a coin that depicted immigrants landing in New York with the Statute of Liberty in the background. The coin reminds me that my ancestors arrived in America in that same fashion. Many of Pietisten’s readers share this same heritage, but even those non-Swedes among us would enjoy reading Robert Ostergren’s history of the emigration of a Swedish community.