Long before those common characteristics became established, Scandinavian Vikings founded colonies in Greenland that survived for five centuries. They probed American coastlands around 1000 C.E., leaving archaeological evidence at L'Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland.

During the seventeenth century Scandinavians made the first effective European settlement in the Delaware basin. Finnish and Swedish colonists in New Sweden (1638�1655) came preadapted to wilderness life, wearing buckskins and fur caps, building log cabins, making swidden clearings, probing the wilderness on long hunting expeditions, and moving frequently. From Indians they learned about turkeys, maize, maple syrup, and sassafras tea. Their syncretic Fenno-Indian backwoods culture was adopted after 1680 by newly arrived Dutch, English, Welsh Quaker, German, and Scotch-Irish settlers. Frontier culture, with its dynamic ability to expand, became the first contribution of Scandinavians to American life. Scandinavian culture also lingered along the Delaware, where the last Lutheran pastor sent from Sweden died in Philadelphia in 1831.

By the 1830s a new and diverse wave of Scandinavian immigration was beginning. Norwegian Quakers settled in upstate New York in 1825. Their letters home attracted more Norwegians, who headed for Illinois, where some became Mormons and joined the trek to Utah in 1846. Mountaineers from the Norwegian Telemark region established rural Lutheran settlements in Wisconsin in 1837. In 1846 Erik Jansson established a Swedish utopian community in Illinois for fifteen thousand followers from Uppland and H�lsingland. Norwegian and Swedish immigrants arrived every year after 1836 in family groups of farm owners who had the means to emigrate.

By 1860 there were over seventy thousand Scandinavian immigrants in America. Churches and local schools were their basic community institutions. Scandinavian-language newspapers appeared by the 1850s. Accustomed to democracy, Scandinavians quickly became involved in American local and county politics. After 1860 they founded multilingual private colleges to educate and train community leaders.

Their ethnic identity remained contested. Their educated elites promoted a common Pan-Scandinavian identity, but most immigrants identified with family, religion, regional dialect, and local subcultures, aligning their communities in the same way. The Civil War added Scandinavian American war heroes to their ethnic icons.

Meanwhile, things were changing in the homelands. From 1815 to 1865 the population of the Scandinavian countries doubled, bringing explosive growth of the crofter class, who paid rent by laboring for their landlord. Crop failures and cheap foreign grain produced an agrarian crisis during the 1870s, just as steamships and railroads were easing long-distance travel. Emigration swelled to a peak in the 1880s. By 1890 over ten percent of all foreign-born in America were Scandinavians, and there were nearly a million of them. The boom came to an abrupt end with the panic of 1893, and mass immigration did not resume until 1903�1914.

Social and ethnic diversity characterized Scandinavian American communities of these years. Artists and professionals pursued urban careers, seafarers formed waterfront enclaves, and artisans clustered in manufacturing cities. Scandinavian workers congregated in many large and small cities. Others came to lumber camps, mining towns, and fishing grounds of Puget Sound and Alaska. So many immigrants poured into Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota that the process of assimilation actually went into reverse. Newcomers often started in older ethnic settlements, then moved to the city or joined groups heading west in search of homesteads. Many were former crofters. On the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, they met harsh, unfamiliar environments.

Life was frequently hard, and ethnic politics became more progressive. In general, Scandinavian Americans had a high level of political activism, exceeded only by the Irish. Some became spokespersons for American reform, including Jacob A. Riis of New York; Thorstein B. Veblen, a social economist and satirist of "conspicuous consumption"; and Joe Hill, songwriter of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

By 1900 Scandinavian American literatures were emerging in the Dano-Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, and Swedish languages. Factors as varied as ethnic newspapers, rail transportation, and mass meetings were starting to link scattered Scandinavian communities, forging new identities. In the Scandinavian American colleges, the second generation developed new concepts of ethnic heritage combining literature, history, and religion from the homeland with Scandinavian American literature and history reaching back in time to the Viking explorers. Graduates of the colleges led the way in reshaping Scandinavian American ethnic identities along these heroic, national lines in the years just prior to World War I.

By 1910 there were over three million first- and second-generation Scandinavians in America, besides all their descendants. Scandinavian American communities seemed to be growing stronger by the year.

The outbreak of World War I brought the growth to a halt. Lutheran churches were branded as disloyal and Finnish Americans labeled as radicals. The antiforeign hysteria peaked in 1917�1918, when one Minnesota judge called for "firing squads" for German and Swedish Americans, and foreign-language newspapers were censored. Then came the "Red Scare" of 1919 directed at immigrants, including Scandinavian socialists. The quota system curtailed postwar immigration, preventing renewal of the immigrant communities. These events left deep scars in the cultural self-confidence of Scandinavian America, and many bilingual members of the younger generation abandoned their ancestral language, switching to English in order to conform.

During the following decades Scandinavian Americans redefined their ethnic identities to correspond with new realities. They needed identities based on English, not Scandinavian languages or bilingualism. Mass ethnic celebrations such as the Norse-American Centennial of 1925 and the New Sweden Tercentenary of 1938 transformed heroic ethnic myths into middle-class identities as solid and American as Mayflower celebrations at Plymouth Rock. Scandinavian American culture penetrated the American mainstream. O. E. R�lvaag's novels of Scandinavian American life became American best-sellers. Scandinavian American scholars including Marcus Lee Hansen, Theodore C. Blegen, and George Stephenson became founders of American immigration studies.

The "new ethnicity" of the 1970s brought still another redefinition of Scandinavian American identity. Ethnic festivals blossomed and stimulated ethnic expression as leisure-time activities involving genealogy, folk dancing, crafts, and tours to the old country. Scandinavian American museums flourished. By 1980 some twelve million Americans claimed Scandinavian ancestry.

When Odd S. Lovoll examined Norwegian American ethnic identity in the 1990s, he found it largely "privatized" into family traditions and ethnic festivals. However, Norwegian American values remained strongly egalitarian and socially compassionate, still helping to counterbalance the competitive, individualistic values that are also part of America.