Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

Alexandra Gripenberg's A Half Year in the New World: Miscellaneous

Sketches of Travel in the United States (1888). Translated and edited

by Ernest J. Moyne. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1954.

xv+225p.; frontispiece and index.)

This volume recounts the observations of Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg,

distinguished Finnish journalist, author, feminist, and temperance advocate,

during a six months' visit to the United States in 1888. The baroness came

to America as a delegate to an international women's congress in Wash-

ington, D. C., and thereafter made a tour of the country, from New York

to California. Her book was published in Helsinki in 1889. It was written

in Swedish and translated into Finnish, and the editor and translator has

used both editions in preparing the text of this volume.

The baroness, like so many other European visitors, recorded her im-

pressions of many of America's scenic wonders, from Niagara, across the

Rockies, to the Yosemite Valley of California. She looked into spiritualism

in Philadelphia; summarized the tenets of Christian Science for her

European readers; visited the Mormons in Utah and discoursed on poly-

gamy; and was conducted through San Francisco's Chinatown, to see the

night life provided for the tourist trade. In Chicago she attended the

Republican national convention, and in San Francisco, the convention of

the National Education Association. In the course of her travels she met

such American celebrities as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,

Frances Willard, the widow of Ole Bull, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark

Twain, Robert G. Ingersoll, and Joaquin Miller. In San Francisco she spent

a little time with the Finns who had settled there, and in Ashtabula, which

she characterized as a "small, sleepy, sandy town in Ohio," she visited the

homes of Finnish laborers, and called upon the publisher of the local

Finnish newspaper. Her references to the Finns in America hardly were

complimentary to her countrymen.

This volume reflects the charm and the progressive views of a cultured

Finnish lady, who, despite her aristocratic antecedents, had real under-

standing for American democracy. Her observations, however, add little

to our knowledge of American life in the late 1880's, and cannot be com-

pared in importance with such earlier works by Scandinavians as the

volumes of Peter Kalm and Fredrika Bremer. The comments on the pro-

ceedings of the N.E.A. are an exception. On the agenda were such topics

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