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Foreword

In New Land, New Lives, Janet E. Rasmussen tells us what she, as a thoughtful and compassionate listener, found to be instructive and emblematic in the personal accounts of ordinary people whom she and her assistants interviewed orally over a period of several years. The narrators all shared a common experience of emigration from one of the Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Iceland—and they all found a home in the Pacific Northwest.

Their evocative recollections cover a broad array of human experiences, ranging from the festive to the mundane tasks of everyday living, and give precious insights into their time and place in history. They all emigrated as children or young adults during the early decades of this century. Distant memories and emotions are recaptured as retrospective accounts of their childhood surroundings in the old country, the meaning of their arrival in America, and their lives as strangers in a new land. Here they for the most part entered the culture of the working class in occupational pursuits common to the earlier Nordic immigrants settling on the west coast of the United States. It is the voices of unknown everyday people, the participants in history who rarely speak directly to us, that we hear in these life histories.

Janet Rasmussen demonstrates her mastery of oral history in these interviews. She uses them with great care, with sensitivity, and with knowledge of the literature on the investigative techniques. She thereby avoids the pitfalls associated with this kind of documentation. The recorded narratives ring true to the historical situation and provide vivid impressions only possible in oral history of individual attitudes and values. She is currently Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Modern Languages at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Rasmussen’s major scholarly focus, as evidenced in publications of high merit, has been on women and their life choices. In addition to a series of in-depth studies of Norwegian female literary figures, she has investigated and published articles on domestic service, marriage patterns, familial values, and feminist ideologies among Scandinavian immigrant women. Some of the latter pieces grew out of the same project as the present oral history anthology.

Finally, I wish to thank the University of Washington Press, and most especially its managing editor Julidta Tarver, for enjoyable and efficient collaboration on this important project. And, again, it is my pleasure to acknowledge with much gratitude the contributions of Mary R. Hove, my editorial assistant, in preparing the manuscript for publication.

Odd S. Lovoll, Editor

The Norwegian-American Historical Association

St. Olaf College