Books

Item Description

Mother-daughter duo Jean M. Matteson and Edith M. Matteson started to write a history of Lutheran churches started by Danes in Howard County, Nebraska. Their research quickly revealed a church network that did not fit easily into county boundaries, and often extended beyond state lines. The result was an extensively researched book of more than 200 pages packed with the stories of nearly 100 congregations across the state. Counties with featured congregations include Antelope, Buffalo, Cherry, Custer, Dakota, Dawson, Dodge, Douglas, Hamilton, Howard, Kearney, Kimball, Lancaster, Lincoln, Nuckolls, Seward, Sheridan, Sherman and Washington. From the introduction by Donald K. Watkins, of the University of Kansas: “In ‘Blossoms of the Prairie (The History of Danish Lutheran Churches in Nebraska),’ Edith and Jean Matteson provide a unique and valuable account of Danish Lutheranism in Nebraska. The fine detail they have gleaned from often remote records is a monument to canny and patient research in a state five times larger than Denmark. This work … is the kind of grassroots historiography which few academic historians have done for any immigrant church. ‘Blossoms of the Prairie’ will in many ways satisfy the needs of historians of the Lutheran church, students of American religious culture and Scandinavian-American history, and those many thousands of people whose lives were affected by Danish-American churches.” The book includes photos and brief biographies of every pastor known to have served in Nebraska’s Danish Lutheran churches from the time of their founding to the time when they quit using the Danish language. It includes a bibliography of diaries and memoirs, letters and interviews, manuscripts and collections, public documents, newspapers, books, congregational histories, unpublished manuscript and theses, and general letters. Tables and maps illustrate major congregational meeting places and cemeteries used by Danish Lutherans in Nebraska from the 1860s to 1930s, Danish Lutheran synods in the United States, the 10 states with the largest Danish-born populations from 1850 to 1940, the 10 Nebraska counties with the largest Danish-born populations and publications associated with Danish-Lutheran congregations. The book is dedicated to the authors’ Danish immigrant ancestors Karen Margrethe and Marius Christian Jensen and their great-great-granddaughter Karin St. Clair.

Item Special Note

Signed by the authors. Hardback, 247 pages, 81/2 x 11 inches. Appendix and index. Printed by American Publishing Co., Askov, Minnesota, in 1988.