The CC2025 conference will feature three educational workshops.

Maren Johnson and Erik Mustad

This proposal presents a simulation-based approach to exploring the complex experiences of Norwegian immigrants to the United States during the 19th century. The simulation, designed for use in middle school to college-level classrooms, is structured around two key historical scenes set in 1835 and 1862. 

The first scene, set in 1835, captures the early wave of Norwegian immigration, a period marked by economic hardship and social upheaval in Norway, which pushed many to seek better opportunities in America. This scene introduces participants to the push-and-pull factors driving emigration, the decision-making process of potential immigrants, and the initial challenges they faced upon arrival in the United States. Through this, students gain insight into the broader European immigration trends of the early 19th century and how these trends shaped the demographic and cultural landscape of the United States.

The second scene, set in 1862, focuses on a later wave of Norwegian immigrants during the American Civil War. This period highlights the intersection of immigration with broader national issues, such as the war, westward expansion, and the evolving notions of citizenship and belonging in the United States. Participants will explore the dilemmas faced by immigrants in this era, including the pressures of assimilation, participation in the war, and the quest for land and stability in the Midwest. By situating Norwegian immigration within the broader narrative of American history, this scene encourages students to critically engage with themes of identity, loyalty, and the immigrant experience.

The simulation is designed as an interactive and engaging pedagogical tool, offering participants the opportunity to step into the shoes of historical figures and make decisions based on the scenarios presented. By test-playing the simulation, conference participants will experience firsthand the educational potential of this tool, exploring how it can be used to foster a deeper understanding of immigration history, critical thinking, and empathy in students.

Our goal is to demonstrate how this simulation can be integrated into existing curricula to enhance the teaching of immigration history. By bringing historical events to life, the simulation provides a dynamic alternative to traditional lecture-based instruction, making complex historical concepts more accessible and relatable to students. Additionally, the simulation encourages active learning, discussion, and reflection, helping students connect past events with contemporary issues of immigration and cultural integration.

By test-playing the simulation at the conference, we seek feedback from participants to refine and improve the tool, ensuring its effectiveness and relevance in diverse classroom settings and provide the resource as a curricular tool for educators. 

Tine Berg Floater and Lee Ann Porter

In this 90-minute workshop, participants will be introduced to a wide variety of primary sources found in library collections and archival holdings that reveal the reasons for, suggest responses to, and illustrate the impact of transnational Norwegian migration.  Select primary sources—including manuscripts, photographs, maps, newspaper articles, emigration and immigration data, ship lists, and more—from both the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Norwegian National Archives in Oslo, Norway, will be featured. Participants will engage in analysis activities, practice search strategies, and share approaches for teaching and research with primary sources across the curriculum and the grade spectrum.

Annette Atkins

In this workshop participants will be invited into a conversation about the fiction of Ole Rolvaag.  Best known, of course, for Giants in the Earth, Rolvaag told multiple versions of the Norwegian immigrant experience: Peder Victorious and Their Fathers’ God (read mostly by serious students of Rolvaag) and (my favorite) The Boat of Longing that takes up the story of an young, male, single immigrant to Minneapolis.

Readers – teachers, students, scholars, descendants of Norwegian immigrants, regional historians – have conjured the immigrant experience through Rolvaag’s language, images, characters, even his point of view.  In his view the experience – and by extension, the book itself – are epic stories, about mythic-sized and defined characters.  The traditional Norwegian sagas have nothing on this Norwegian-American saga.  The experience as he described it was of monumental proportions, wrestling with giants.

Rolvaag is also praised for his representation of the contributions of those Norwegian immigrants to American life and culture, his championing of ethnic pluralism, his treatment of the problem of hyphenated Americans.  His books explore conflict among immigrant groups, about the preservation and deterioration and reconstruction of ethnic identity.

Not every reader has been enthusiastic.  A recent anonymous reviewer for “Good Reads,” for example, wrote:  “I hated this book. It felt like counting sand. Or corn. Or whatever the hell they were growing. Oh and everyone is named Hansa. Seriously, this book moves so slow, you could literally skip entire chapters (maybe even 2 or three), and NOTHING WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.’  I certainly faced more than one student who had a similar response.  Are they just wrong?

Some more recent historians of the American Midwest have simply ignored the book, uncomfortable with Rolvaag’s accounts of the interactions between immigrants and native people.  Some historians even identify immigrants as settler colonists who unjustly and carelessly displaced Native People and have profited for generations from that land grab (however mediated by federal government and railroad land grants).  Many contemporary Midwestern organizations begin public gatherings with variously worded land acknowledgements.  Should new editions of Rolvaag’s books offer an even deeper and more powerful acknowledgment?

In short, Rolvaag’s books stand at the vortex of sets of issues and attitudes that deserve consideration, conversation, and airing of multiple approaches and reactions to this monumental man and his works on this 100th anniversary of the publication of Giants in the Earth.

All comers to the workshop will be invited to participate.  I would organize the attendees into groups representing each of the above points of view and orchestrate first small group discussions and then larger group conversation.  In my experience, assigning a point of view to a person invites insights and understandings that go deeper and wider than straightforward and often combative expressions of our own views/responses.  In this experience I hope to help people of different points of view practice talking across and through those differences.  That seems a worthy and Rolvaag-like aim.