A Viking statue, a coffee pot, a ghost story, and a controversial cake: What can the things that immigrants treasured tell us about their history? Between 1870 and 1914 almost one-quarter of Iceland’s population migrated to North America, forming enclaves in both the United States and Canada. This book examines the multi-sensory side of the immigrant past through rare photographs, interviews, artefacts, and early recipes. By revealing the hidden histories behind everyday traditions, The Viking Immigrants maps the transformation of Icelandic North American culture over a century and a half.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Dressing Up: Clothing, Power, and Upward Mobility in the Early Immigrant Community, 1870–1900
2. Coffee Pots and Homebrew Stills: Drinking Cultures, Pleasure, and Belonging in the Icelandic Immigrant Community
3. Unsettling Apparitions: Icelandic-North American Ghost Stories and Superstitious Belief
4. Main Street Vikings: Anglicization, Spectacle, and the Two World Wars
5. "Don’t ask Icelanders how to make their Christmas Cake": A Brief History of Vínarterta
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author :
L.K. Bertram is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.
Review :
"Bertram has made a groundbreaking and unique contribution to the study of this ethnic community’s history, focusing her study on the broad categories of clothing, beverages, the supernatural, Viking symbolism, and baking. The reader who opens this book will not follow a traditional and technical history of Icelandic struggles and settlement in North America, accounts of which are often hyperbolic or narrowly focused on leading men and institutions. Instead, Bertram leads the reader into the lives of characters resurrected from archives, oral accounts, and newspaper sources, among other primary sources."
- Andrew McGillivray (Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 93, No. 2) "The focus on the everyday allows Bertram to probe issues that have remained taboo in the more celebratory reminiscences of Icelandic heritage in North America. Particularly intriguing is Bertram’s examination of colonial trauma."
- Aleksi Huhta, University of Helsinki ( H-Soz-Kult) "The Viking Immigrants breaks new ground, makes an important contribution to the literature on white ethnic groups in western Canada, and, if that were not enough, includes an appendix with historical vínarterta recipes."
- Ryan Eyford, University of Winnipeg (Prairie History)
