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zazazache 12 minutes ago [-]
I thought this was going to be about how Sweden’s claimed neutrality is a sham (even more so now that we joined NATO), but I guess it would have been vassal and not colony in the title if that were the case.
anyonecancode 5 hours ago [-]
I first learned about New Sweden several years ago from reading The Barbarous Years[0]. Now I always think about it whenever I drive south toward Maryland and DC when I cross the Delaware and see signs for towns like Swedesboro (NJ) and various Cristiana/Christiana place names in DE.
I guess it's a secret to the Brits and the BBC. We learned about Swedish colonies in the Delaware Valley area in fifth grade history class.
So secret that it had its own U.S. postage stamp, as shown at the top of TFA.
There's lots of things that people learned in elementary school in the UK that I don't know about. That doesn't made them a secret.
timc3 2 hours ago [-]
Its just a stupid headline isnt it, I am British born and knew about it but then again I also live in Sweden and like learning about history.
eesmith 43 minutes ago [-]
The title refers to the secrecy related to its founding, not any present-day secrecy. From the text:
> "It started as sort of secret colony," said Deborah-Jean Hoffman, a board member at the New Sweden Centre, which promotes the Delaware Valley's colonial history. "The Swedes weren't flag-planting like the French or the Spanish. The idea was to create an under-the-radar colony where the Dutch wouldn't see them."
dreamcompiler 2 hours ago [-]
There are a number of lesser-known chunks of American history like this.
One of my favorites is that Santa Fe has been the capital city of Nuevo Mexico since 1610. Acoma, another city in modern-day New Mexico, is about 500 years older still.
> One of my favorites is that Santa Fe has been the capital city of Nuevo Mexico since 1610. Acoma, another city in modern-day New Mexico, is about 500 years older still
We were taught this in California in elementary school. Spanish colonial history actually tends to be taught at the same time or earlier than East Coast history in much of the American West (usually as "California" or "Texas" or "Colorado" history).
comrade1234 8 hours ago [-]
This is stupid. And New York was new Amsterdam before the USA and a lot more people came through new Amsterdam (including my family) than whatnever new Sweden was. And the Netherlands was already a democracy before the USA's Declaration of Independence so they would have got ideas from that rather than whatever Sweden was. This is just reaching to write an article.
1659447091 3 hours ago [-]
> And New York was new Amsterdam before the USA
The article does not dispute this, in fact it's a big part of the New Sweden history in the article. The same person is credited for being responsible for both
> and a lot more people came through new Amsterdam (including my family) than whatnever new Sweden was
Again, Not in dispute. There are paragraphs about how it was a far-flung failed settlement that was taken twice, once by each Dutch and English -- but smooth way to throw in your families long US history coming in through such a a popular port as New Amsterdam. One of my ancestor lines came through some backcountry called Jamestown; def not a swank sounding place like modern-day NYC.
>> "Despite its territorial expansion, New Sweden never became the profitable venture it was conceived to become because it was chronically under-populated and neglected. The colony never counted more than about 400 people" [...] "From 1638-1655, this forgotten Swedish settlement extended across the Delaware Valley, encompassing parts of modern-day New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. In addition to being the smallest, least-populated and shortest-lived European colony in the US, it was also the most clandestine."
> so they would have got ideas from that rather than whatever Sweden was
Where does it even say anything about ideas for Declaration of Independence came from Sweden?
macintux 6 hours ago [-]
Or, just maybe, people are interested in knowing more about history? I certainly never knew there was a Swedish colony in the U.S., so I’m glad the article was written.
BigTTYGothGF 5 hours ago [-]
> And the Netherlands was already a democracy before the USA's Declaration of Independence
They were a republic.
karlshea 5 hours ago [-]
A republic is a democracy.
ianburrell 3 hours ago [-]
Republic back then meant commonwealth with any form of government. The Dutch Republic was loose union of seven provinces. Republic changed to mean democratic government by representatives without monarch.
true_religion 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think the meaning of republic changed, it just got conflated with democracy because we often say 'Democratic Republic', which requires at least in modern (18th century and beyond) terms that the common people vote to decide political direction or policy.
The US itself didn't start off very democratic, and could have stablized into a more oligarchic nation if it kept the notion of only allowing property owners to vote. Originally, land ownership wasn't a high barrier of entry, but in a more modern era corporations or oligarchs could own most of the land, and lease it out to prevent anyone else from gaining a vote.
randallsquared 5 hours ago [-]
It need not be democratic in the modern, universal suffrage sense.
stonogo 5 hours ago [-]
Netherlands was not. It was a republic of oligarch-run states. They did not have even landholder suffrage until halfway through the 1800s.
topgrain2 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, “ackshually it’s a republic” is usually a case of midbrow “incorrecting” (political scientists regularly use “democracy” to label a basket of political systems that include democratic republics, it’s not just normal vulgar usage, the “pros” use it that way, too, all the time)… buuuuut this time it might be a hair worth splitting.
ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago [-]
Like the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Those ones?
aaronbrethorst 4 hours ago [-]
And New York was new Amsterdam before the USA and a lot more people came through new Amsterdam
Why they changed it, I can't say, people just liked it better that way.
fakedang 7 hours ago [-]
Uh, what's your gripe? The article clearly states that the colony was pivotal to American history for two reasons - 1.) For creating the log cabin and 2.) For being the only colony to not have been at war with the natives by choice.
The article even says why the colony suffered - lack of supplies and immigrants to the colony from Sweden. That even corroborates with your point.
And yes, imo those two reasons are pretty significant enough reason to remember that New Sweden existed.
zkmon 3 hours ago [-]
What an irony - the once European colonies which depended on their motherlands to defend them in an alien land, now become a menace or estranged godfather to Europe.
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
At least 25% of us Americans have never had blood or ethnic ties with Europe.
African Americans make up around 15% of the US, Asian Americans around 7%, Arab Americans around 1.5%, and Native Americans around 2%.
That percentage is likely much higher when you factor Latino Americans - the plurality of whom either have indigenous or African ethnic origins. And some of America's richest and most politically powerful states like California and Texas have some of the lowest rates of European heritage in the nation.
This whole "America is European" mentality reeks of West European supremacy and fails to recognize how diverse America is. The only European ethnic groups who still have active blood and ethnic ties with the old country tend to be Central and Eastern Europeans or Irish Americans - large pluralities of whom were forced to leave the old country due to colonial reasons (the Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and British rule in Ireland was equally destructive as colonial rule outside Europe).
Alternatively, the only reason Western Europe didn't have a Park Chung Hee, Suharto, or Zia was because Europeans who were naturalized Americans like Brzeziński (Poland), Kissinger (Germany), and Albright (Czechoslovakia) ran policy during the Cold War era.
The modern equivalents of Brzeziński, Albright, and Kissinger are all either Heritage (ie. Pre-Civil War), Latino, Asian, or Arab American.
Why should European states be given privileges that Japan, South Korea, Phillipines, Taiwan, and others weren't extended until the last 30 years?
We are not a European ethnostate. We are America.
true_religion 2 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the US is arguably even more of a menace to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and even the descendent of native Americans who live in other countries (e.g. Mexico).
So the OPs point is internally consistent, even generalized past a mentality that 'reeks of West European supremacy'.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
As an Asian American I strongly disagree, as do most others of us non-white Americans.
You guys don't actually understand how stuff actually works here or how we think. Our (Asian and Latino) ancestral countries economies are heavily tied with the US and leadership in our ancestral countries (excluding PRC ofc) remains either pro-Trump (look at the elections all across Latin America this year) or pro-America but Trump ambivalent (eg. Brazil and India).
And unlike Europe, at least in Asia all the states began arming and building strategic autonomy all the way back in the Obama 1 admin as part of the "Pivot to Asia".
You guys also don't seem to get the fact that the plurality of Americans have viewed Asia and not Europe as our most important partner since all the way back in 2009 [0].
We (the non-Europe aligned Americans) are increasingly climbing the rungs to become the decisionmaker's now in both parties.
Benign Atlanticism is dead in 2026. All that matters now is G2.
If that means both us and China squeezing Europe until it pops, so be it - when elephants fight it's the grass that gets stomped on.
Way more than 10%, because Hispanics are not considered mixed race even though most of us are.
r3trohack3r 2 hours ago [-]
> America is European
When I hear this, I think of the philosophy, system of laws, language, etc. in America - and not the percentages we get when we segregate the American population by their ancestors.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
What I mean is we aren't going to give European states undue favoritism due to personal ties, which Brzeziński, Kissinger, and Albright all did in some shape or form.
After 1945, Western Europe got Pan-Atlanticism but now much more dynamic South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc got dictatorships, military rule, and single party rule.
Now that we are pivoting to our Hemisphere and Asia due to G2, the gloves have begun to fall off with regards to Europe.
US-Asia trade already dwarfs US-Europe trade, and Europe is a secondary concern compared to G2.
abcdxyz999 2 hours ago [-]
There is no real supremacy for western europeans since they built wealth by looting others. They didn't have to do that. Analogy would be some persons doing bank robbery, chain snatching, slavery etc instead of doing agriculture without slavery or working in a real ethical job which isn't cheating or looting or harming others to earn income or wealth.
abcdxyz999 2 hours ago [-]
They could have survived and thrived without colonialism or slavery or imperialism.
[0]https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-barbarous-years-the-peoplin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Long_Swede
I guess it's a secret to the Brits and the BBC. We learned about Swedish colonies in the Delaware Valley area in fifth grade history class.
So secret that it had its own U.S. postage stamp, as shown at the top of TFA.
There's lots of things that people learned in elementary school in the UK that I don't know about. That doesn't made them a secret.
> "It started as sort of secret colony," said Deborah-Jean Hoffman, a board member at the New Sweden Centre, which promotes the Delaware Valley's colonial history. "The Swedes weren't flag-planting like the French or the Spanish. The idea was to create an under-the-radar colony where the Dutch wouldn't see them."
One of my favorites is that Santa Fe has been the capital city of Nuevo Mexico since 1610. Acoma, another city in modern-day New Mexico, is about 500 years older still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoma_Pueblo
We were taught this in California in elementary school. Spanish colonial history actually tends to be taught at the same time or earlier than East Coast history in much of the American West (usually as "California" or "Texas" or "Colorado" history).
The article does not dispute this, in fact it's a big part of the New Sweden history in the article. The same person is credited for being responsible for both
> and a lot more people came through new Amsterdam (including my family) than whatnever new Sweden was
Again, Not in dispute. There are paragraphs about how it was a far-flung failed settlement that was taken twice, once by each Dutch and English -- but smooth way to throw in your families long US history coming in through such a a popular port as New Amsterdam. One of my ancestor lines came through some backcountry called Jamestown; def not a swank sounding place like modern-day NYC.
>> "Despite its territorial expansion, New Sweden never became the profitable venture it was conceived to become because it was chronically under-populated and neglected. The colony never counted more than about 400 people" [...] "From 1638-1655, this forgotten Swedish settlement extended across the Delaware Valley, encompassing parts of modern-day New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. In addition to being the smallest, least-populated and shortest-lived European colony in the US, it was also the most clandestine."
> so they would have got ideas from that rather than whatever Sweden was
Where does it even say anything about ideas for Declaration of Independence came from Sweden?
They were a republic.
The US itself didn't start off very democratic, and could have stablized into a more oligarchic nation if it kept the notion of only allowing property owners to vote. Originally, land ownership wasn't a high barrier of entry, but in a more modern era corporations or oligarchs could own most of the land, and lease it out to prevent anyone else from gaining a vote.
Why they changed it, I can't say, people just liked it better that way.
The article even says why the colony suffered - lack of supplies and immigrants to the colony from Sweden. That even corroborates with your point.
And yes, imo those two reasons are pretty significant enough reason to remember that New Sweden existed.
African Americans make up around 15% of the US, Asian Americans around 7%, Arab Americans around 1.5%, and Native Americans around 2%.
That percentage is likely much higher when you factor Latino Americans - the plurality of whom either have indigenous or African ethnic origins. And some of America's richest and most politically powerful states like California and Texas have some of the lowest rates of European heritage in the nation.
This whole "America is European" mentality reeks of West European supremacy and fails to recognize how diverse America is. The only European ethnic groups who still have active blood and ethnic ties with the old country tend to be Central and Eastern Europeans or Irish Americans - large pluralities of whom were forced to leave the old country due to colonial reasons (the Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and British rule in Ireland was equally destructive as colonial rule outside Europe).
Alternatively, the only reason Western Europe didn't have a Park Chung Hee, Suharto, or Zia was because Europeans who were naturalized Americans like Brzeziński (Poland), Kissinger (Germany), and Albright (Czechoslovakia) ran policy during the Cold War era.
The modern equivalents of Brzeziński, Albright, and Kissinger are all either Heritage (ie. Pre-Civil War), Latino, Asian, or Arab American.
Why should European states be given privileges that Japan, South Korea, Phillipines, Taiwan, and others weren't extended until the last 30 years?
We are not a European ethnostate. We are America.
So the OPs point is internally consistent, even generalized past a mentality that 'reeks of West European supremacy'.
You guys don't actually understand how stuff actually works here or how we think. Our (Asian and Latino) ancestral countries economies are heavily tied with the US and leadership in our ancestral countries (excluding PRC ofc) remains either pro-Trump (look at the elections all across Latin America this year) or pro-America but Trump ambivalent (eg. Brazil and India).
And unlike Europe, at least in Asia all the states began arming and building strategic autonomy all the way back in the Obama 1 admin as part of the "Pivot to Asia".
You guys also don't seem to get the fact that the plurality of Americans have viewed Asia and not Europe as our most important partner since all the way back in 2009 [0].
We (the non-Europe aligned Americans) are increasingly climbing the rungs to become the decisionmaker's now in both parties.
Benign Atlanticism is dead in 2026. All that matters now is G2.
If that means both us and China squeezing Europe until it pops, so be it - when elephants fight it's the grass that gets stomped on.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/americans-turn-their-backs-o...
Am I wrong? Is the child of a white person and a black person not considered black in the US? Is that not the case form the other groups too?
Either way Europeans overestimate American ties to Europe. If you actually visit America in 2026, most culture is either domestic, Asian, or Latino.
Heck, the majority of Americans began viewing Asia and not Europe as America's most important partners back in 2009 [0].
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/americans-turn-their-backs-o...
When I hear this, I think of the philosophy, system of laws, language, etc. in America - and not the percentages we get when we segregate the American population by their ancestors.
After 1945, Western Europe got Pan-Atlanticism but now much more dynamic South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc got dictatorships, military rule, and single party rule.
Now that we are pivoting to our Hemisphere and Asia due to G2, the gloves have begun to fall off with regards to Europe.
US-Asia trade already dwarfs US-Europe trade, and Europe is a secondary concern compared to G2.