Although Swedes participated in the colonial settlement of the Mid-Atlantic, most Scandinavian immigrants arrived in the US between 1880 and 1920, including some 300,000 from Denmark, 750,000 Norwegians and 1.25 million Swedes. While smaller than some other groups, these numbers were extremely large for the populations involved—one-fifth of all Swedes lived in the US at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Subsequent immigration, however, has been primarily professionals and sojourning business people; in the 1970s, emigration to Sweden (a haven for Vietnam protestors) exceeded immigration to the US.

While Danes scattered throughout the northern United States, Norwegians and Swedes often chose rural homesteads in the upper Midwest—especially Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and South Dakota. Nonetheless, in 1900, Chicago, IL was the second-largest Swedish city in the world after Stockholm. Lutheran churches, ethnic press and society and a liberal populist political orientation united these communities, although all were highly assimilated by the 1930s. By this time Swedish Americans became American heroes (aviator Charles Lindbergh) and interpreters (poet Carl Sandburg).

As older institutions and language faded, some pan-Scandinavian associations solidified through Lutheran church mergers, social clubs and parades attuned to the new ethnicity of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, radio essayist Garrison Keillor also popularized a nostalgic yet tender vision of “bachelor Norwegian” farmers and Scandinavian American rural life in his fictional Lake Woebegon.