Title: The Colony that Rose from the Sea
Author: David C. Mauk
Format: Hardcover, no dustjacket as issued, 272 pages
Illustrations: Black and white photos and drawings
Size: 10 1/2" x 7 1/2"
Publisher: Norwegian American Historical Association - distributed by University of Illinois Press, 1997
ISBN: 0877320861
New book in shrink wrap that was never fully opened.
A scholarly work that focuses on the East coast community that developed primarily through the irregular, often illegal immigration of merchant seamen.
Norway rapidly became a major shipping nation after 1850. The Brooklyn "colony" was but the largest of its settlements overseas whose economic, religious, residential, and social life showed a distinctive configuration because they were originally centered on a transient population, and gradually (if at all) became communities dominated by people in more permanent residence.
Various forms of transience, sojourning and chain migration led to distinctive "transplanted" institutions. These branches of old-country organizations arose because people at home wanted to provide religious succor and social welfare for an itinerant, floating workforce of the country's nationals who were temporarily abroad. After a protracted struggle, the transplanted institutions in Norwegian Brooklyn gave way to an immigrant culture strongly colored by both the traditions of secular cosmopolitanism and pleasure-seeking common to sailors abroad and the tee-totalist religious pietism, small-scale entrepreneurship, and independent womanhood characteristic of the southern coastal region of Norway from which the largest group of the colony's residents came.
