The Dutch American Identity: Staging Memory and Ethnicity in Comm ...

A more substantial, but still small, body of published work exists concerning festivals that celebrate other ethnicities of European origin. Several scholars—mostly folklorists and cultural historians—have written about celebrations of Swedish heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas (Danielson, “The Ethnic Festival” and “St. Lucia;” Bodnar, Remaking America; Graden); the same is also true of celebrations and articulations of Swiss heritage in New Glarus, Wisconsin (Hoelscher; Zarilli & Neff). A variety of other studies address recurring festivals that celebrate a community’s heritage for the benefit of outsiders as well as the community itself. For example, Hoelscher and Ostergren compare a Swedish celebration in Cambridge, Minnesota to New Glarus. Robert Swiderski studies an Italian-American festival. Michael Cronin and Daryl Adair investigate St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Deborah Anders Silverman writes on Dyngus Day in Polish-American communities. And John Bodnar (Remaking America) compares and contrasts Norwegian, Swedish, Mennonite, and Irish celebrations. In addition, Kathleen Neils Conzen has written on nineteenth-century German-American celebrations, April Schultz on the 1925 Norse-American Immigration Centennial celebration held in Minneapolis, and Robert Orsi on Italian-American celebrations in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While literature on celebrations and articulations of ethnicity—performances of ethnicity, if you will—within celebrations or festivals might be limited, there is no shortage of literature on ethnicity and ethnic groups in the United States. Such studies may deal with how ethnicity has been preserved across several generations, the different ways in which succeeding generations have related to their ethnicity, or the ways in which individuals claim, or are claimed by, particular ethnic identities. Key works and collections that address all of these issues of ethnicity among European groups in the United States include Werner Sollors’ Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, The Invention of Ethnicity (ed. Sollors), The Ethnic Enigma: The Salience of Ethnicity for European-Origin Groups (ed. Peter Kivisto), and American Immigrants and Their Generations (ed. Kivisto and Dag Blanck). More specifically, ethnicity in communities on the Great Plains and the western part of the United States is addressed in Ethnicity on the Great Plains (ed. Frederick Luebke) and European Immigrants in the American West: Community Histories (ed. Luebke).