[4] These immigrants settled predominantly in the Midwest, particularly in states like Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin, in similarity with other Nordic and Scandinavian Americans.

[citation needed] In the year 1900, Chicago was the city with the second highest number of Swedes after Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

Many others settled in Minnesota in particular, followed by Wisconsin; as well as New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Illinois.

There are towns scattered throughout the Midwest, such as Lindsborg, Kansas and Lindström, Minnesota, that to this day continue to celebrate their Swedish heritage.

[12] Swedes have been persistent during the long history of New York City, but have never been a major immigrant group in the metropolitan region.

[13] An early community of Swedish immigrants (1848) became established in northwestern Pennsylvania and western New York stemming from the port of Buffalo connecting the Erie Canal with the Great Lakes.

[16] In the east, New England became a destination for many skilled industrial workers and Swedish centers developed in areas such as Jamestown, New York; Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston.

Hans Olof Andræ, born 1933 in Vimmerby, Sweden) who was known to occasionally conduct special worship services in Swedish.

[citation needed] Many Swedes also came to the Pacific Northwest during the turn of the 20th century, along with Norwegians and Finns, settling in Washington and Oregon.

The new generation was especially proud of the Swedish contributions to American democracy and the creation of a republic that promised liberty and destroyed the menace of slavery.

[20] Adolph B. Benson in ending the book Vår svenska stam på utländsk mark i västerled, USA och Kanada, Stockholm 1952 (pages 428–429): An old emigrant letter, written in the summer of 1865 by a farmer in the Swedish lands of the Midwest to relatives in his home country, tells how they were at work out on the farm, when the news of President Lincoln's death reached them.

In words which clearly speak of how this notice chilled them to the core, we're told of how their chores came to a halt, how their tools fell from the hands of the men, how these Swedish settlers felt as if their whole faith in life suddenly had been displaced, had collapsed.

To a significant extent, it was also the pursuit of that ideal that had brought them the long way across the sea to the Big Country in the west.Swedes, moreover, were among the first founders of America with their New Sweden colony in Delaware.

Swedish America was present in Congress under the Articles of Confederation period, and its role was momentous in fighting the war against slavery.

As a paragon of freedom and the struggle against unfreedom, and as an exemplar of the courage of the Vikings in contrast to the Catholic Columbus, Swedish America could use its culture to stress its position as loyal adherents to the larger Protestant American society.

[21] As a highly literate population, their output of print media was even more remarkable, and cultural leadership was exerted by numerous magazine and newspaper editors more so than by churchmen.

[22] Valkyrian, a magazine based in New York City, helped fashion a distinct Swedish American culture between 1897 and 1909.

They had no illusions about American life but they chose to stay and confront difficult living and working conditions rather than move on or return to Sweden where good jobs were scarce and paid much less.

[citation needed] Many of their children were upwardly socially mobile, and America offered girls in particular greater opportunities than Sweden did.

[27] The story of A. V. Swanson, who in 1911 left Bjuv at age 20 and settled in Ames, Iowa, eight years later is a case study in farming and business success.

There still is a lot of research waiting to be done on the more urban and working-class parts of the Swedish immigrant group, where some ended up in slums like Swede Hollow in St. Paul, Minnesota, which had a population of about roughly 1,000 squatters around 1890 (slightly less in 1900, according to the census carried out that year).

Political pressures during the war encouraged a rapid switch from Swedish to English in church services—the older generation was bilingual by now and the youth could hardly understand the old language.

[35] After 1940, the Swedish language was rarely taught in high schools or colleges, and Swedish-language newspapers or magazines nearly all closed.

It was founded by Lutheran pietists in 1869 on land purchased from the Kansas Pacific Railroad; the First Swedish Agricultural Company of Chicago spearheaded the colonization.

By the 1970s Lindsborg residents pulled together a unique combination of musical, artistic, intellectual, and ethnic strengths to reinvent their town.

The Lindsborg plan is representative of growing national interest in ethnic heritage, historic preservation, and small-town nostalgia in the late 20th century.

[40] Swedish Americans often include påskris (an Easter bush) with twigs cut from a tree, placed in a vase with colored feathers and decorative hanging eggs added.

[42] Annually a Swedish American of the Year is awarded through Vasa Order of America District Lodges 19 and 20 in Sweden.

Founded in 1963, the conference links a general audience with the world's foremost scholars and researchers in conversations centered on contemporary issues related to the natural and social sciences.

It is the first ongoing academic conference in the United States to have the official authorization of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.