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List of Swedish Americans

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The following is a list of notable Swedish Americans, including both original immigrants who obtained American citizenship and their American descendants.

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List

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Candice Bergen

Entertainment

Actors

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Ann-Margret

Music

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Kris Kristofferson
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Ricky Nelson
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Gretchen Carlson

Other

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Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt

Artists

Engineers

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John Ericsson
  • Ernst Alexanderson, Swedish-born, electrical engineer[47]
  • Ragnar Benson, Chicago building contractor
  • Ernst Julius Berg, Swedish-born, American electrical engineer. A pioneer of radio, he produced the first two-way radio voice program in the United States
  • Stig Bergström, Swedish-American paleontologist who described the conodont family Paracordylodontidae and in 1974, he described the multielement conodont genus Appalachignathus from the Middle Ordovician of North America
  • Chester Carlson, physicist, inventor, and patent attorney[48]
  • John Ericsson, Swedish-born, inventor and mechanical engineer[49]
  • Carl Friden, Swedish-born, American mechanical engineer and businessman who founded the Friden Calculating Machine Company
  • Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, Swedish-born parents, aircraft engineer and aeronautical innovator, considered one of the most talented and prolific aircraft design-engineers[50]
  • John B. Johnson, Swedish-born, electrical engineer and physicist
  • Clarence Hugo Linder, of Swedish descent, electrical engineer, founding member of the National Academy of Engineering
  • Harry Nyquist, Swedish-born, engineer, important contributor to information theory[51]
  • John W. Nystrom, engineer[52] Swedish born, American civil engineer, inventor, and author. He served as an assistant Secretary and Chief Engineer of the United States Navy during the American Civil War.
  • Arvid Reuterdahl, Swedish-American engineer, scientist and educator

Entrepreneurs and businesspeople

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Hugh Hefner
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Buzz Aldrin

Military

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Emil Holmdahl and his pet dog during the campaign against Zapata. c 1913

Politics and public service

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Mamie Eisenhower
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William Rehnquist
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Paul Carlson

Religious personalities

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Carl David Anderson
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George Ord
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Carl-Gustaf Rossby
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Glenn T. Seaborg

Science

  • Carl David Anderson, physicist who won 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics[104]
  • Alexander P. Anderson, was an American plant physiologist, botanist, educator and inventor. His scientific experiments led to the discovery of "puffed rice", a starting point for a new breakfast cereal that was later advertised as "Food Shot From Guns"
  • Ernst Antevs, was a Swedish-American geologist and educator who made significant contributions to Quaternary geology, particularly geomorphology and geochronology
  • Hugo Leander Blomquist, was a Swedish-born American botanist. His well-rounded expertise encompassed fungi, bacteria, bryophytes, algae, grasses, and ferns
  • John Elof Boodin, Swedish-born, philosopher and educator
  • Anton Julius Carlson, was a Swedish American physiologist. Carlson was Chairman of the Physiology Department at the University of Chicago from 1916 until 1940
  • Gunnar E. Carlsson, professor
  • John Carlstrom, Swedish-American astrophysicist, and Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics, at the University of Chicago
  • Walter Elmer Ekblaw, geologist, botanist, and college professor
  • Gustav Eisen, was a Swedish-American polymath. He became a member of California Academy of Sciences in 1874 and a Life Member in 1883
  • Per Enflo, University Professor of Mathematics at Kent State University
  • Otto Folin, was a Swedish-born American chemist who is best known for his groundbreaking work at Harvard University
  • Fritiof Fryxell, was an American educator, geologist and mountain climber, best known for his research and writing on the Teton Range of Wyoming
  • Lennart Heimer, was a Swedish-American neuroscientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia. He was most noted for mapping circuits of the brain in the limbic lobe and basal ganglia, structures that play central roles in emotion processing and movement
  • John Bertrand Johnson, Swedish-born American electrical engineer and physicist. He first explained in detail a fundamental source of random interference with information traveling on wires
  • Torkel Korling, Swedish-born American industrial, commercial, portrait and botanical photographer
  • Ludwig Kumlien, was an American ornithologist. He took part in the Howgate Polar Expedition 1877-78 and collected a large number of bird specimens which led to the discovery of several new species
  • Thure Kumlien, was a Swedish-American ornithologist, naturalist, and taxidermist. A contemporary of Thoreau, Audubon, and Agassiz, he contributed much to the knowledge of the natural history of Wisconsin and its birds
  • John Bernhard Leiberg, Swedish-American botanical explorer, forester, and bryologist
  • Paco Lagerstrom, was an applied mathematician and aeronautical engineer
  • David R. Lindberg, malacologist, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley
  • Charles E. Lindblom, was an American academic who was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Economics at Yale University
  • Waldemar Lindgren, was a Swedish-American geologist. Lindgren was one of the founders of modern economic geology
  • Carl Marcus Olson, has been credited as the discoverer of the process to make silicon pure.
  • George Ord, zoologist who specialized in North American ornithology and mammalogy
  • Roger Tory Peterson naturalist, ornithologist, illustrator and educator, held to be one of the founding inspirations for the 20th-century environmental movement, his father was a Swedish immigrant
  • Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Swedish-born American meteorologist who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. He identified and characterized both the jet stream and the long waves in the westerlies that were later named Rossby waves
  • Per Axel Rydberg, Swedish-born, American botanist who was the first curator of the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium
  • Glenn T. Seaborg, Nobel Prize laureate, chemist prominent in the discovery and isolation of ten transuranic elements including plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and seaborgium, which was named in his honor[105]
  • Thorsten Sellin, was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology
  • Folke K. Skoog, Swedish-born American plant physiologist who was a pioneer in the field of plant growth regulators
  • Orvar Swenson, Swedish-born American pediatric surgeon. He discovered the cause of Hirschsprung's disease and in 1948, with Alexander Bill, performed the first pull-through operation in a child with megacolon
  • Max Tegmark, cosmologist and associate professor of physics at MIT
  • Stephan Thernstrom, Winthrop Research Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University
  • Ernest Harry Vestine, geophysicist and meteorologist
  • J. E. Wallace Wallin, was an American psychologist and an early proponent of educational services for the mentally handicapped
  • Nils Yngve Wessell, was a Swedish-American psychologist and the eighth president of Tufts University from 1953 to 1966, overseeing its transformation from a small liberal arts college to an internationally known research university
  • Peter Jansen Wester, was a Swedish-American agricultural botanist. Born in Sweden, he emigrated to the United States in 1897. Wester worked in several agricultural offices from 1897 to 1903, including leading the United States Department of Agriculture's experiment station and experimental plots for subtropical plants in Miami.
  • Olof B. Widlund, Swedish-American mathematician. He is well known for his leading role in and fundamental contributions to domain decomposition methods
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Phil Mickelson

Sports

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Ray Bradbury
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Carl Sandburg

Writers

Colonial people

Educators

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Charles Lindbergh

Other

  • Bob Arno, Swedish-American entertainer, known primarily as a comedy pickpocket, and more recently criminologist specializing in global street crime
  • Leroy J. Alexanderson, last captain of the SS United States
  • Alfred O. Andersson, publisher
  • H. S. "Andy" Anderson, Swedish-American woodcarver, one of the recognized masters of 20th-century woodcarving, most famous for Scandinavian flat-plane style of woodcarving and caricature carving
  • Bo Andersson, former General Motors executive, and present President/CEO of GAZ Group
  • Lillian Asplund, Titanic survivor
  • William Lee Bergstrom, commonly known as The Suitcase Man or Phantom Gambler, was a gambler and high roller known for placing the largest bet in casino gambling history at the time amounting to $777,000 ($2.41 million present day amount) at the Horseshoe Casino, which he won
  • Oscar Broneer, prominent Swedish American educator and archaeologist known in particular for his work on Ancient Greece. He is most associated with his discovery of the Temple of Isthmia, an important Panhellenic shrine dating from the seventh century B.C.
  • Paul Carlson, American physician and medical missionary who served in Congo. He was killed in 1964 by rebel insurgents after being falsely accused of being an American spy
  • Victor Carlstrom, record-holding Swedish-American pioneer aviator. He set a cross-America flight air speed record
  • Neil Erickson, Swedish-born American pioneer in Cochise County, Arizona
  • Eric Enstrom, Swedish-born American photographer. He became famous for his 1918 photograph of Charles Wilden in Bovey, Minnesota. The photo is now known as "Grace" and depicts Wilden saying a prayer over a simple meal
  • Axel Erlandson, Swedish American farmer who shaped trees as a hobby, and opened a horticultural attraction in 1947 called "The Tree Circus"
  • Frank Erickson, Arnold Rothstein's right-hand man and New York's largest bookmaker during the 1930s and 40s
  • Febold Feboldson, American folk hero who was a Swedish American plainsman and cloudbuster from Nebraska
  • Abraham Fornander, journalist, judge and ethnologist
  • Franklin S. Forsberg, publisher and diplomat
  • Nicholas Gustafson, Swedish immigrant who was mortally wounded in the James–Younger Gang bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota
  • Olof Hanson, first deaf American architect
  • Eric A. Hegg, Swedish-American photographer who portrayed the people in Skagway, Bennett and Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush from 1897 to 1901
  • Olof Jonsson, Swedish-born engineer and psychic, famous for his long-distance telepathy experiment during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971
  • Gary Larson, Swedish-American cartoonist. He is the creator of The Far Side, a single-panel cartoon series
  • Charles Lindbergh, pioneering aviator famous for piloting the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927[31]
  • Erik Lindbergh, aviator
  • Godfrey Lundberg, Swedish-born, engraver[116]
  • Jon Lindbergh, former underwater diver from the United States. He has worked as a United States Navy demolition expert and as a commercial diver, and was one of the world's earliest aquanauts in the 1960s. He was also a pioneer in cave diving. He is the oldest surviving child of aviator Charles Lindbergh
  • Raymond Nels Nelson, Chief of Staff Senator Claiborne Pell, R.I., former Bureau Chief, Providence Journal, unsolved murder 1981
  • Frank Olson, biochemist, he was covertly given LSD in the CIA's MKUltra program
  • Sigurd F. Olson, author, environmentalist, and advocate for the protection of wilderness
  • Ingrid Pedersen, Swedish-American aviator; first female pilot to fly over the North Pole
  • Buell Halvor Quain, ethnologist
  • Eric P. Quain, Swedish-born physician who co-founded the Quain and Ramstad Clinic in Bismarck, North Dakota. He also served as head of surgical services in France for the United States Army during World War I.
  • Tom Rolf, Swedish-born American film editor who worked on at least 48 feature films in a career spanning over fifty years. Famous for editing Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese.
  • Calvin Rutstrum, author of wilderness camping experiences and techniques books
  • Olaf Swenson, Seattle-based fur trader and adventurer active in Siberia and Alaska in the first third of the 20th century. His career intersected with activities of notable explorers of the period, and with the Russian Civil War. He is credited with leading the rescue of the Karluk survivors from Wrangel Island in 1914
  • Ivor Thord-Gray, Swedish-born, adventurer, ethnologist and linguist[117]
  • Jon Winroth, American wine critic who wrote for The New York Times
  • Valentin Wolfenstein, Swedish-American photographer who worked both in Stockholm and Los Angeles, California; one of the first photographers to use flash-lamps for photography
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References

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