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Timothy R. Tangherlini - Review of Jennifer Eastman Attebery, As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity

Timothy R. Tangherlini - Review of Jennifer Eastman Attebery, As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity


Blue floral motif

Jennifer Attebery opens her study with a tale of two statues on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Capitol, one the statue of a woman pointing with her arm raised, and entitled “Forward,” and the other, a statue of Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian American farmer who led a regiment against the Confederacy during the Civil War. During protests in June of 2020 as part of the broader Black Lives Matter movement, the latter statue was severely damaged, the victim of a possible misinterpretation of Heg’s contributions to the abolitionist movement and his military service. Yet Attebery offers a more nuanced reading of Heg, noting that while he was against slavery, he was “not necessarily a believer or proponent of Black-white equality” (4). Attebery uses this recent event, and the complexities of the narratives that create overlapping, at times conflicting, narratives of heritage, identity, and belonging as a way into her discussions of local-history writing. The result is a sophisticated understanding of how local immigrant-history writing incorporates stories told as true, as well as anecdotes, which are then interwoven to create a rich narrative tapestry. These histories, in turn, form part of an ongoing negotiation of Scandinavian American and, more specifically, Swedish American identity. In the seven chapters of this short yet densely argued work, Attebery interrogates how vernacular histories and legends are deployed as part of the process of creating community and belonging.

Attebery’s first chapter, “What is historical legend?”, offers a detailed overview of legend theory. She argues for the necessity of the subgenre “historical legend,” and shows how the localization and periodization of these stories do considerable work in creating senses of place, time, and belonging. The chapter is remarkably thorough yet concise, and offers summaries of theoretical considerations of place, temporality, and content. Her insight into the indexicality of historical legend—and the status that may accrue to a teller who can claim some connection through story to history—is an important observation. The discussion of community consensus is particularly insightful, and gestures toward local social dynamics in the selection and editing of local histories. This selection process might well be democratic as Attebery implies, noting, “As scribes for their communities, local historians break down the media barrier between oral sources and written history by representing the voices of their sources through storytelling” (33). Yet it is also this selection process—what is left out, whose voices are not surfaced in the vernacular history—that might also be a productive site of investigation.

The second chapter presents a series of local Swedish American histories and explores how these local histories are closely linked to concepts of heritage. Attebery provides a broad overview of local-history writing in the United States going back to the early nineteenth century. She includes a brief consideration of Richard Dorson’s excavations of local-history writing for folkloric content, but recasts these local historical works as “vernacular” texts, and poses a series of folklore-inspired questions about them: “Who is (are) the writer(s)? Which people constitute the implied audience? What artifactual and verbal forms key one’s recognition of the genre “local history”? How is the geography of the “local” imagined?” and so on (41). These questions then animate the remainder of her engagements with local historical vernacular texts and the embedded historical legends. It is also in this chapter that she presents her three main case studies: Beresford, 1884-1984, which is a “committee authored” local history; Swedish Pioneers in Saunders County, Nebraska, which is characterized as a “single editor compilation”; and Stuck in the Mud at Post Oak Island, which is identified as a “single-author text incorporating many voices.” These three different ways of authoring local histories provide multiple avenues for the interrogation of what constitutes a local history, who gets to author that history, the role of local and historical legend in that process, and the ways in which heritage and belonging can be constructed.

While chapter 3 employs a largely methodological approach for working with “texts within texts”—here the embedded historical legends—and relies heavily on narrative theory, the following three chapters provide focused engagement with three important dimensions of these embedded texts and the local histories in which they are embedded: content, rhetoric, and ostension, where individuals or communities act on their received notions of their shared past. The content chapter provides a mapping of the embedded stories onto several conceptual categories, and it is the chapter that provides the most insight into the corpus of embedded legend with which she works. The first content category is labeled “The Old Country,” which is only sparsely present in the local histories considered here. As Attebery notes, “local history writing may look back at the emigrant past, but it reserves storytelling for experiences on American soil” (80). Stories in the category “Arrival in America” often present moments of misunderstanding, while “Secondary and Further Relocations” consider the ongoing transplantation of experience. The sections on “Place and Space” explore encounters with established places or the challenges of constructing new places out of poorly defined spaces, while “next generation” narratives establish a clear sense of “becoming” Swedish American. An interesting experiment, which is not done here, would be to apply emerging techniques from digital humanities to explore concepts of semantic overlap across these interesting categories.

Chapter 5 explores the rhetoric of legend and relies heavily on Linda Dégh’s and Elliott Oring’s theories related to the rhetorics of belief and truth respectively. In the penultimate chapter, Attebery considers the relationship between local histories, the embedded stories, and the acting out of these stories or episodes within them. She notes the distinction between the ostension of legend tripping associated with contemporary legend and the pseudo-ostension associated with hoaxes, and offers a series of refinements to the overall concept of ostension. She suggests that the various forms of ostension associated with immigrant stories do cultural work in a fundamentally different manner from these other modes of ostension: “through literal ostensive action, immigrants could successfully navigate migration and later commemorate it, through quasi-ostension they could examine how migration and ethnicity affected them, and through proto-ostension, they could claim and master a new identity” (146). In her final chapter, Attebery offers a critique of the positionality of local vernacular histories and the problematics associated with creating a critical local history.

As Legend Has It will be of interest not only to researchers in Scandinavian American (Swedish American) history, but also to historians of the American Midwest as well. The informed and thorough discussions of folklore will provide students considerable grounding in legend studies, while showing the applicability of these methods to the study of histories that escape the traditional boundaries of more classical approaches to historiography. The reading is theoretically dense and can be challenging; undergraduates would need considerable guidance to work with this book. It is also worth noting that the book does not provide a narrative of Swedish American history, nor of the changing conceptions of Swedish American identity. Rather, it provides a rich methodology for working with local vernacular histories, it reveals the role of the folkloric in such histories, and it shows how a deep, critical engagement with these works can create critical insights that resonate to our present day.

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[Review length: 1203 words • Review posted on April 21, 2024]