Nordic ways and Scandinaviantraditions, how Scandinavians live and the Scandinavian traits that have survived into the 21st century.

Our Scandinavian roots may be strong or weak but history is fast becoming increasingly important. Photographer Nina Korhonen has created a loving and extremely beautiful book about her Finnish grandmother, who lived for forty years in America. We see images of grandma in the streets of New York City, shopping in a supermarket, walking like a goddess in the waves, hanging out with friends in a home for senior citizens, and standing up while drinking a cup of coffee in the kitchen. There are also provocative (for nudity-shy Americans) images of grandma posing in her birthday suit and taking a bath. But photos from the daily life of this elderly woman, taken in New York and Lake Worth, Florida - of her sewing box and the inside of her refrigerator - are in a sense as revealing and intimate. We get to know Anna and some of the things and places that probably gave joy and meaning to this person's life.

The English and Swedish-language book "Anna: Amerikan Mummu" (published by Journal, Stockholm, 2004) is a worthy tribute to a woman whose fate was probably typical for Nordic immigrants to the USA, but at the same time was most remarkable. The author/photographer explains in her preface how her grandmother, in 1959, "realized her life's dream and alone, with a couple of hundred dollars and no special skills in English", took an airplane to New York, where she first worked in a shirt factory while living with her brother Arvi. She eventually got a job as a cook with a wealthy family "in a duplex apartment so large that the number of rooms were never counted, in upper Manhattan's east side".  Anna stayed with this family for over 20 years, until her retirement at age 70.
Nina Korhonen's book was featured in our issue 11.

Whether you support it or not, the fact is, for thousands of Scandinavians - and Americans - one way to enjoy nature is to hunt. Yet there are some astonishing cultural differences between Scandinavian and American hunting traditions. Our guest editor, Professor Thomas Heberlein of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, made a compelling analysis of different ways of dealing with nature, hunting and firearms in "The Gun, the dog and the thermos."