Question

what was the experience of the mormons as they traveled from teh midwest

Answer 1

Answer:

This dissertation is a study of European immigrants in the rural Midwest during

the era of mass migration.1

Most such studies have focused on collective experiences.

Some scholars have sought to generalize about a single nationality group, often with

reference to some kind of organized activity such as religion, politics, or education.

Others have examined small rural places dominated by one immigrant group, or explored

assimilation and “Americanization” in an ethnically mixed settlement. These studies have

expressed a shared desire to generalize, to find the “typical,” to identify the

“community,” to scrutinize the organizations, structures, and cultural forms that tied

people together as a collective. While recognizing the shortcomings of essentialism and

showing deep concern for the ways in which the social world is constructed (at least in

recent years), scholars have nevertheless directly or indirectly looked for “essences,” and

for summary characterizations of the experiences of large groups, formulated in striking

book titles. Thus rural German-speaking women were “contented among strangers” while

Norwegians saw their “promise fulfilled.”2

The emphasis on collective experience is understandable. Recent scholars have

rightfully sought to correct an earlier view of the frontier as a place of unrestrained

individualism, as the historical record shows nineteenth century migrants and immigrants

joining together to create a wide variety of formal and informal institutions. Furthermore,

1

For the purposes of this dissertation, the “era of mass migration” may be loosely defined as the period

from about 1830 to 1925. We are now in a second era of mass migration, but it obviously involves few

Europeans migrating to the rural Midwest.

2

Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their

Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Odd Lovoll, The

Promise Fulfilled: A Portrait of Norwegian Americans Today (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1998