Dr. Ulf Jonas Bjork is starting a new position at the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center on Augustana College's campus.
"Ulf is such a strange name. It's an ancient Norse name that is hard to pronounce here, so I'll go by Jonas. And I am a visiting professor, half Swenson Center, and half teaching Swedish courses in the Scandinavian department," Jonas said in an interview with WVIK.
Jonas spent over 35 years teaching journalism at Indiana University–Purdue University in Indianapolis. While at the university, he researched early foreign correspondents in American media as well as American popular culture's influence on Sweden. For the past 25 years, he has visited the Swenson Center every fall in an advisory committee role, but this fall, he's become an employee.
Jonas says he works alongside the Head of Collections librarian, Janette Garcia, in cataloging the vast amounts of letters, papers, and publications.
"Right now, I'm trying to find or catalog obscure Swedish language publications, which we have there, but we don't quite know if anybody else has them or exactly where they belong," Jonas said.
He first visited the center in 1986 as a student writing his doctoral dissertation about Swedish-American newspapers.
"I quickly learned that this, the Swenson Center is really the premier site for Swedish-American archives in North America. We sometimes say even in the world," Jonas said. "There are places in Sweden that have extensive collections, particularly the National Library, but this is a very impressive archive here."
Jonas says Swedish-American newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed immigrants to connect with and follow news from Sweden while encountering local American traditions, which helped them assimilate in the U.S.
"And also the third part is to create an identity that you are not quite American because you weren't born here. You're not Swedish because you left. So you are something new, a new people almost. You're Swedish-Americans," Jonas said.
He mentions that newspapers at the time informed immigrants of America's democracy. For most immigrants, the ability to vote was a foreign concept, as many were used to having a king. The following pages in the newspaper could inform the reader of town celebrations, neighbor birthdays and reviews from local plays.
Unfortunately, multiple world wars, the creation of radio, and the Great Depression caused most Swedish-American newspapers to close.
Before starting at the Swenson Center this fall, he assisted the center in finding sample papers for the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul and the Royal Library in Sweden.
"And it's actually available now if you go to the Minnesota Historical Society homepage. What is great is that we made a selection," Jonas said. "Now there's money. They're going to do every single newspaper that they can find published in Swedish here in North America. I was over in Sweden for Christmas and doing some research about a really obscure paper in Colorado, in Denver. It was published only for a few years. And the librarian said, '[W]ell, you can't have that. And I said, why? Well, we're digitizing it.' And I thought, if they're digitizing this really obscure little newspaper, then they're really digitizing everything. And that's the plan."
Jonas wants to compile all of his research on the Swedish-American press into a book after seeing the mass appeal of digitization. He says the ability to search for a keyword online within the papers is great, but having the context of the paper's mission and history would be beneficial to future audiences.
The Swenson Center provides classroom instruction, assistance for people wanting to research their genealogy and hosting events for the community. Residents can contact the center to make an appointment for genealogy and to look through some of the archives. The center is open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to noon.
