Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
History
Date of Award
8-2024
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Steven Nash
Committee Members
Jennifer Adler, Stephen Fritz
Abstract
While memory studies of the American Civil War flourishes, ethnic and immigrant perspectives remain obscured. This project attempts to uncover how Norwegian-Americans remembered the 6000 Norwegian immigrants who fought in the Union Army. It explores the processes behind commemoration of Colonel Hans Christian Heg and the 15th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment from 1914 to 1928. It reveals that Norwegian-Americans commemorated Colonel Heg on three different and connected levels. Nationally, Norwegian-Americans raised a statue of Heg in Wisconsin after the individual determination of Waldemar Ager to challenge nativism and Americanization. Transnationally, Ager cooperated with the organization Nordmands-Forbundet who facilitated the erection of a replica in Norway in their efforts to create an extraterritorial national community known as the “greater Norway.” Locally, citizens of Racine County, Wisconsin, mobilized to raise their own Heg monument. These events combined local, national, and transnational identities, and illuminate the multilayered complexity of ethnicity in early twentieth-century America.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Berg, Remi, "Transatlantic Memory and Identity: The Legacy of Colonel Heg and the 15th Wisconsin in Norway and Norwegian America" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 4426. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/4426
Copyright
Copyright by the author.