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.
> But chances are, almost none of those coming realises that the US's political and ideological birthplace was once part of a little-known Swedish colony known as Nya Sverige (New Sweden).
Or they think Virginia has a strong claim to be "the US's political and ideological birthplace." The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson was from Virginia. The "Father of the Constitution," James Madison, was from Virginia. George Washington was from Virginia.
It's not like only one European country had colonies in the pre-United States.
> But chances are, almost none of those coming realises that [Philadelphia] was once part of a little-known Swedish colony known as Nya Sverige (New Sweden).
That's all it's trying to say in this sentence. It's not trying to say that the New Sweden colony was actually the US's political and ideological birthplace. (That's how you read it, right? I'm not sure how your last sentence makes sense otherwise; Philadelphia was a creation of the same European country as Virginia.)
The ship having the Finnish flag is just a bit anachronistic methinks. Finland would have been under Swedish rule back then (and Swedish, which used to be a language of the elite, is still an official language albeit spoken by a ~5% minority nowadays). The Finnish flag didn't become a thing until much, much later. Even the nationalist Fennoman movement was started by Swedes.
Did you know that Finns weren't always considered white? If you do a bit of Wikipedia spelunking, you'll find e.g. an old German map that paints Finland yellow for 'mongoloid'. Weird, eh? Somewhat recently the Swedes returned some Finnish skulls that were stolen and studied by so-called racial 'scientists'. Also, Finns were apparently called 'China Swedes' in the States.
Another fun fact for those interested: Finnish is a Uralic language, related to neither Swedish nor Russian. In fact, the Uralic languages are a family separate from Indo-European languages.
There is an Ikea in south Philadelphia not far from the Old Swedes Church, but they do not do anything to promote the Swedish history there, however brief.
The colors of the flag is Philadelphia pay homage to this Swedish heritage.
You can easily sail with a fleet of several hundred longships across smaller bodies of water like the North Sea and concentrate enough power to threaten existing kingdoms on the other side. This is a journey of ~ 3 days, and under optimal conditions, they could make it across in a day and a half.
Sending even a tenth of that force across the Northern Atlantic, with its different weather patterns, longer distances, icebergs and very few places to replenish your resources (Iceland yes, Greenland maybe - they lived fairly on the edge as it was, with not much of a food surplus), was not feasible. A few ships could do it, but a few ships means a few people, and in the Americas, which were settled by other people already, it meant that you were a somewhat weak guest to someone else's territory, and you could always be thrown out or made to leave.
I blame it all on one guy. What if that plonker who broke ranks on
the English side during the battle of Hastings after the English had
successfully held the high ground against the French all day stayed in
bed that morning, and William the Conqueror just had to bugger off
back where he came from? The British Isles turn away from Europe and
develop stronger ties with Scandinavian countries over the ensuing
centuries. A kingdom of the north eventually extends to encompass
Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the Iroquois confederation well
before Columbus. With first contact happening at a time when neither
side has any technological advantage, the relationship becomes more of
an alliance than a colonization. I don't know how to extrapolate
further except to imagine that the world looks very different.
The English didn't have the easiest time of it, despite substantially more advanced technology, much better resources backing up the whole enterprise, and a native population devastated by diseases brought earlier by the Spanish.
They didn't develop ships suitable for crossing the Atlantic.
You and a group of your buddies would get together while you were young, build boats, and go be pirates for a while until it was time to settle down somewhere.
There isn't a straightforward transition to the larger amount of organization and economy needed to build the larger more sophisticated ships to cross the Atlantic and land somewhere southerly enough to meaningfully colonize.
The Vikings didn’t “conquer” new lands the way you might imagine. Rather than just raiding, they often settled, intermingled with the locals farmers and established new states.
As seen in Scottish Isles, Ireland, Danelaw (England), Ukraine, Faroes, Iceland, Normandy, Greenland, Newfoundland etc they sack some leadership but quickly integrate and evolve into mostly peaceful farming societies
> The Vikings didn’t “conquer” new lands the way you might imagine. Rather than just raiding, they often settled, intermingled with the locals farmers and established new states
There aren’t any the viking settlements in the Americas from that time? Or at least evidence of intermingling with the locals.
The interesting part of the book to me was that the Swedes and the native American Indians negotiated as equals for the land purchase, it wasn't by means of violence or deceit. In the end they depended on the purchase of food from the natives during a bad harvest.
Amazing that modern Delawareans have built a beautiful replica of the Kalmar Nyckel ship, considering how little impact the Swedish colony had on American history.
All in all, Swedish and Dutch colonists, although enemies, treated each other very much as gentlemen. Taking a fort meant showing up with the larger force and the other surrendering. Forts changed hands several times, which isn't mentioned in the BBC article.
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).
I grew up in Texas and took Texas history. I learned things like Texas being the only US state that was once an independent country and where the Six Flags came from (later the name of an amusement park empire that originated in Texas).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'.
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.
This is the weirdest rant I've read from you, in all my years on HN, and will colour my future reading of your contributions.
Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to view the world in terms of race, tribalism, and might-makes-right: even if those you accept to be the unfortunate bystanders are different from who they were historically, I'll concede that you are fully in line with the American tradition.
And same as with the pre-2008 (per your comment) American tradition, it's an ideology that will make the world a worse place. Shame.
> 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%.
Those are cultural identities. The average African American has ~20% European ancestry. Latin Americans vary by country and region of origin, but on the average, they have more European than Native American ancestry.
Yes, but most do not associate with some form of European identity or solidarity. The overwhelming majority of African Americans do not view Europeans as their kin and vice versa. Same with a plurality of Latinos depending on where they come from as well as their race.
OP's comment represents a very common sentiment and implication I've noticed amongst Europeans:
1. That America is inherently "European" and always will be
2. America has an obligation to Europe over other regions of the world
3. Americans view Europe as more important than other regions of the world
4. That Americans from non-European backgrounds are not in policymaking positions or that our opinions don't affect American political discourse
The Atlanticist world that existed from 1945 to 2008 only existed because the older generation of national security advisors and foreign policy hands in the US were first-generation European immigrants.
Their era is long gone on both sides of the aisle. Culturally, America is much closer now to Latin America or Asia looking at music, television, and fashion. Economically (based on bilateral trade flow), America is much closer to Asia and the Americas than Europe. And even demographically, those with living blood ties to Europe are a fraction of those with living blood ties to Asia or Latin America.
And the rise of "Heritage Americans" as an ethnic identifier also highlights how the one subgroup of white Americans who might have been open to keeping ties with Europe is turning their back on the continent as well.
Asia and the Americas are prepared for such a world, but Europeans still think America has some obligation to help them or treat their states as equals when they are at best junior partners.
> Culturally, America is much closer now to Latin America or Asia.
That's an interesting statement. From my perspective, Latin America is clearly European, in the sense I understand the concept. It feels much like Russia. Major cities and densely populated regions are European, with local characteristics. But there are other cultures around, and they are dominant in some regions. And if you travel in fringe areas, you often find peoples that have not fully accepted the European cultural package.
I don't see Europeanness as something associated with specific ethnic groups or states. It's a cultural package that started spreading from the Roman Empire and was imposed upon different peoples at different times. Where I'm from, that happened ~800 years ago, though rural areas often kept to the old pagan ways until the 17th century. That time frame is not too different from what happened in the Americas.
> Latin America is clearly European, in the sense I understand the concept
But depending on where you are in Latin America as well as their familial background they may or may not associate with a European identity.
The LatAm states who associate the most with Europe are also the most racial homogenous (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) because of mass European migration in the late 19th and 20th century.
Other larger states like Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Dominican Republic, etc do not associate with Europe because these were highly mixed societies with large indigenous or African populations, and anti-Europeanism is almost as strong as anti-Americanism for historical reasons (eg. The French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, the Mayan genocide in 1980s Guatemala led by white Guatemalan leadership).
Most Latinos know they aren't viewed as kin by Europeans and don't view them as kin either.
> I don't see Europeanness as something associated with specific ethnic groups or states. It's a cultural package that started spreading from the Roman Empire and was imposed upon different peoples at different times
But you need to accept you are European to truly be European, which we do not - look at the rise of "Heritage American" as an identity amongst White Americans.
Europeans are invalidating almost 400 years of domestic American cultural development as well as minimizing African, Native, and Asian American influences - which is a major cultural influence in vast swathes of the US - by pushing this notion that America is "European" and as such has an obligation to Europe.
We aren't European. We're Western.
The US has had it's own culture and European influence waxes and wanes depending on region, and most Americans simply don't view Europe as important anymore since 2008-09.
Ignore the political aspects for now and focus on culture. And feel free to use "Roman" if "European" sounds wrong. But "Western" is wrong, because the same cultural sphere extends to Australia, New Zealand, and Russian Far East.
From my perspective, as someone from the Northern fringes of Europe, Latin American society and culture feel fundamentally familiar, while Middle East and North Africa don't. Out of the Latin American countries I'm most familiar with, Peru feels more European and Chile more American. Peru feels more like an Old World country, while Chile used to be a sparsely populated frontier.
Europeans definitely don't view other Europeans as kin. They are foreigners with a lot of shared history and culture. Both World Wars were fought because Europeans saw other Europeans as fundamentally different.
> But "Western" is wrong, because the same cultural sphere extends to Australia, New Zealand, and Russian Far East
Yes. And Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are viewed as "Western" in American discourse as well. The Russian Far East isn't though.
> From my perspective, as someone from the Northern fringes of Europe, Latin American society and culture feel fundamentally familiar
> Out of the Latin American countries I'm most familiar with, Peru feels more European...
Frankly, a Finn isn't the right person to make this distinction. And if you've been to Peru you most likely spent the bulk of your time in Miraflores and other European parts of Lima, and not the majority indigenous hinterland. The European-Indigenous fault line is a major faultline in Peru going back to the Shining Path days.
I've spent more time in the Andes than in Lima. The Quechua are clearly an indigenous group, but they have been forced to adopt most of the European cultural package. If you travel in Russia, you can find many ethnic groups in similar situations.
As European, I think America has an obligation to those that were already there, and all our ancestors helped to almost wipe out, those are the real native ones.
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.
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.
"US-Asia trade already dwarfs US-Europe trade", that is not really true now is it? Here is a quote from John Hopkins foreign policy institute in their THE TRANSATLANTIC ECONOMY 2026 report: "The facts are straightforward but often ignored. The $9.8 trillion commercial relationship between the United States
and Europe is by a wide margin the deepest, broadest, and most mutually beneficial between any two continents
in history – and those ties are accelerating despite the headline noise." Source: https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Transatlantic-Eco... The EU is the worlds largest trading block, anyone is welcome not doing business with us, but it will likely be at your loss.
Do you not consider Roman Catholicism to be part of the European heritage? I sure do.
A lot of Latino Americans and indigenous people are Roman Catholics, so part of European heritage.
I don't understand why you mention "never had blood .. ties" when at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842245 you reject the relevancy of blood ties. Wouldn't your argument make more sense as just "never had ethnic ties with Europe.
As a reminder, Obama, African-American son of a white woman, once visited Moneygall, where an Irish ancestor lived, and said "My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas."
Lastly, I see you switched from "blood or ethic ties" to "heritage". Could you elaborate on what that means? Must I be Greek inherit some of the intellectual heritage of Ancient Greece? How is my claim to the traditional European liberal arts education heritage any stronger or weaker than that of W. E. B. Du Bois?
Almost all African Americans have some European heritage by blood. If you go to Africa you will see some truly dark skinned people, who haven't any European ancestry. How can you not have noticed this in a world of global broadcasts?
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.
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.
[0]https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-barbarous-years-the-peoplin...
New Sweden also gave America one of the first attempted colonial rebellions against English rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Long_Swede
> But chances are, almost none of those coming realises that the US's political and ideological birthplace was once part of a little-known Swedish colony known as Nya Sverige (New Sweden).
Or they think Virginia has a strong claim to be "the US's political and ideological birthplace." The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson was from Virginia. The "Father of the Constitution," James Madison, was from Virginia. George Washington was from Virginia.
It's not like only one European country had colonies in the pre-United States.
> But chances are, almost none of those coming realises that [Philadelphia] was once part of a little-known Swedish colony known as Nya Sverige (New Sweden).
That's all it's trying to say in this sentence. It's not trying to say that the New Sweden colony was actually the US's political and ideological birthplace. (That's how you read it, right? I'm not sure how your last sentence makes sense otherwise; Philadelphia was a creation of the same European country as Virginia.)
The article mentioned the "the 12-year-old Queen of Sweden" which is quite an interesting story of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina,_Queen_of_Sweden
The ship having the Finnish flag is just a bit anachronistic methinks. Finland would have been under Swedish rule back then (and Swedish, which used to be a language of the elite, is still an official language albeit spoken by a ~5% minority nowadays). The Finnish flag didn't become a thing until much, much later. Even the nationalist Fennoman movement was started by Swedes.
Did you know that Finns weren't always considered white? If you do a bit of Wikipedia spelunking, you'll find e.g. an old German map that paints Finland yellow for 'mongoloid'. Weird, eh? Somewhat recently the Swedes returned some Finnish skulls that were stolen and studied by so-called racial 'scientists'. Also, Finns were apparently called 'China Swedes' in the States.
Another fun fact for those interested: Finnish is a Uralic language, related to neither Swedish nor Russian. In fact, the Uralic languages are a family separate from Indo-European languages.
There is an Ikea in south Philadelphia not far from the Old Swedes Church, but they do not do anything to promote the Swedish history there, however brief.
The colors of the flag is Philadelphia pay homage to this Swedish heritage.
I knew it- that architecture- those red houses with the wide windowframe.. that is swedish..
I'm wondering why the Vikings didn't conquer the Americas long before.
Logistics was not on their side.
You can easily sail with a fleet of several hundred longships across smaller bodies of water like the North Sea and concentrate enough power to threaten existing kingdoms on the other side. This is a journey of ~ 3 days, and under optimal conditions, they could make it across in a day and a half.
Sending even a tenth of that force across the Northern Atlantic, with its different weather patterns, longer distances, icebergs and very few places to replenish your resources (Iceland yes, Greenland maybe - they lived fairly on the edge as it was, with not much of a food surplus), was not feasible. A few ships could do it, but a few ships means a few people, and in the Americas, which were settled by other people already, it meant that you were a somewhat weak guest to someone else's territory, and you could always be thrown out or made to leave.
I blame it all on one guy. What if that plonker who broke ranks on the English side during the battle of Hastings after the English had successfully held the high ground against the French all day stayed in bed that morning, and William the Conqueror just had to bugger off back where he came from? The British Isles turn away from Europe and develop stronger ties with Scandinavian countries over the ensuing centuries. A kingdom of the north eventually extends to encompass Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the Iroquois confederation well before Columbus. With first contact happening at a time when neither side has any technological advantage, the relationship becomes more of an alliance than a colonization. I don't know how to extrapolate further except to imagine that the world looks very different.
The English didn't have the easiest time of it, despite substantially more advanced technology, much better resources backing up the whole enterprise, and a native population devastated by diseases brought earlier by the Spanish.
They didn't develop ships suitable for crossing the Atlantic.
You and a group of your buddies would get together while you were young, build boats, and go be pirates for a while until it was time to settle down somewhere.
There isn't a straightforward transition to the larger amount of organization and economy needed to build the larger more sophisticated ships to cross the Atlantic and land somewhere southerly enough to meaningfully colonize.
they did
They briefly visited, they didn't "conquer"
The Vikings didn’t “conquer” new lands the way you might imagine. Rather than just raiding, they often settled, intermingled with the locals farmers and established new states.
As seen in Scottish Isles, Ireland, Danelaw (England), Ukraine, Faroes, Iceland, Normandy, Greenland, Newfoundland etc they sack some leadership but quickly integrate and evolve into mostly peaceful farming societies
> The Vikings didn’t “conquer” new lands the way you might imagine. Rather than just raiding, they often settled, intermingled with the locals farmers and established new states
There aren’t any the viking settlements in the Americas from that time? Or at least evidence of intermingling with the locals.
They got destroyed by the indians
Yes but that didn't happen in the Americas. They didn't settle or leave any lasting impact.
The book "Swedes on the Delaware" (or "The Swedes in America") is a comprehensive history of this colony:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77652.epub3.images
The interesting part of the book to me was that the Swedes and the native American Indians negotiated as equals for the land purchase, it wasn't by means of violence or deceit. In the end they depended on the purchase of food from the natives during a bad harvest.
Amazing that modern Delawareans have built a beautiful replica of the Kalmar Nyckel ship, considering how little impact the Swedish colony had on American history.
All in all, Swedish and Dutch colonists, although enemies, treated each other very much as gentlemen. Taking a fort meant showing up with the larger force and the other surrendering. Forts changed hands several times, which isn't mentioned in the BBC article.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoma_Pueblo
> 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).
I grew up in Texas and took Texas history. I learned things like Texas being the only US state that was once an independent country and where the Six Flags came from (later the name of an amusement park empire that originated in Texas).
But they never taught us much about New Mexico.
Vermont was also an independent country, and for longer than Texas was.
The Hawaiian Kingdom lasted from 1795 to 1893.
Yet another thing they didn't teach us in Texas history class.
Not New Mexico but New Spain is heavily taught - it's an entire section.
I also don't know when you were in K-7 but knowing HN's age demographics probably the 1980s to early 1990s.
From the 2000s onwards, New Spain and Spanish rule was prominent.
Here are the snippets of the Texas History textbook from around the time I was in grade school in the 2000s [0][1][2]
[0] - https://worleytxhistory.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/9/6/8796216/c...
[1] - https://worleytxhistory.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/9/6/8796216/c...
[2] - https://worleytxhistory.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/9/6/8796216/c...
Looks like BBC is deliberately trolling the US... :DD
New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony
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.
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."
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.
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.
The title is misleading because it is suggests it is about a colony of the US (like Phillipines), not a colony on territory which is now US.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Haha, clever!
> And the Netherlands was already a democracy before the USA's Declaration of Independence
They were a republic.
The Republic of Venice formed in 697
While technically correct, that doesn't prevent the Netherlands from also being one a millennium later.
San Marino claims the year 301 AD.
A republic is a democracy.
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.
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.
It need not be democratic in the modern, universal suffrage sense.
Netherlands was not. It was a republic of oligarch-run states. They did not have even landholder suffrage until halfway through the 1800s.
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.
Like the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Those ones?
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.
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.
Now? The last name of the man who conquered Europe through a crusade of enormous bloodshed was Eisenhower.
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.
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'.
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.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/americans-turn-their-backs-o...
This is the weirdest rant I've read from you, in all my years on HN, and will colour my future reading of your contributions.
Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to view the world in terms of race, tribalism, and might-makes-right: even if those you accept to be the unfortunate bystanders are different from who they were historically, I'll concede that you are fully in line with the American tradition.
And same as with the pre-2008 (per your comment) American tradition, it's an ideology that will make the world a worse place. Shame.
> 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%.
Those are cultural identities. The average African American has ~20% European ancestry. Latin Americans vary by country and region of origin, but on the average, they have more European than Native American ancestry.
Yes, but most do not associate with some form of European identity or solidarity. The overwhelming majority of African Americans do not view Europeans as their kin and vice versa. Same with a plurality of Latinos depending on where they come from as well as their race.
OP's comment represents a very common sentiment and implication I've noticed amongst Europeans:
1. That America is inherently "European" and always will be
2. America has an obligation to Europe over other regions of the world
3. Americans view Europe as more important than other regions of the world
4. That Americans from non-European backgrounds are not in policymaking positions or that our opinions don't affect American political discourse
The Atlanticist world that existed from 1945 to 2008 only existed because the older generation of national security advisors and foreign policy hands in the US were first-generation European immigrants.
Their era is long gone on both sides of the aisle. Culturally, America is much closer now to Latin America or Asia looking at music, television, and fashion. Economically (based on bilateral trade flow), America is much closer to Asia and the Americas than Europe. And even demographically, those with living blood ties to Europe are a fraction of those with living blood ties to Asia or Latin America.
And the rise of "Heritage Americans" as an ethnic identifier also highlights how the one subgroup of white Americans who might have been open to keeping ties with Europe is turning their back on the continent as well.
Asia and the Americas are prepared for such a world, but Europeans still think America has some obligation to help them or treat their states as equals when they are at best junior partners.
> Culturally, America is much closer now to Latin America or Asia.
That's an interesting statement. From my perspective, Latin America is clearly European, in the sense I understand the concept. It feels much like Russia. Major cities and densely populated regions are European, with local characteristics. But there are other cultures around, and they are dominant in some regions. And if you travel in fringe areas, you often find peoples that have not fully accepted the European cultural package.
I don't see Europeanness as something associated with specific ethnic groups or states. It's a cultural package that started spreading from the Roman Empire and was imposed upon different peoples at different times. Where I'm from, that happened ~800 years ago, though rural areas often kept to the old pagan ways until the 17th century. That time frame is not too different from what happened in the Americas.
> Latin America is clearly European, in the sense I understand the concept
But depending on where you are in Latin America as well as their familial background they may or may not associate with a European identity.
The LatAm states who associate the most with Europe are also the most racial homogenous (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) because of mass European migration in the late 19th and 20th century.
Other larger states like Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Dominican Republic, etc do not associate with Europe because these were highly mixed societies with large indigenous or African populations, and anti-Europeanism is almost as strong as anti-Americanism for historical reasons (eg. The French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, the Mayan genocide in 1980s Guatemala led by white Guatemalan leadership).
Most Latinos know they aren't viewed as kin by Europeans and don't view them as kin either.
> I don't see Europeanness as something associated with specific ethnic groups or states. It's a cultural package that started spreading from the Roman Empire and was imposed upon different peoples at different times
But you need to accept you are European to truly be European, which we do not - look at the rise of "Heritage American" as an identity amongst White Americans.
Europeans are invalidating almost 400 years of domestic American cultural development as well as minimizing African, Native, and Asian American influences - which is a major cultural influence in vast swathes of the US - by pushing this notion that America is "European" and as such has an obligation to Europe.
We aren't European. We're Western.
The US has had it's own culture and European influence waxes and wanes depending on region, and most Americans simply don't view Europe as important anymore since 2008-09.
Ignore the political aspects for now and focus on culture. And feel free to use "Roman" if "European" sounds wrong. But "Western" is wrong, because the same cultural sphere extends to Australia, New Zealand, and Russian Far East.
From my perspective, as someone from the Northern fringes of Europe, Latin American society and culture feel fundamentally familiar, while Middle East and North Africa don't. Out of the Latin American countries I'm most familiar with, Peru feels more European and Chile more American. Peru feels more like an Old World country, while Chile used to be a sparsely populated frontier.
Europeans definitely don't view other Europeans as kin. They are foreigners with a lot of shared history and culture. Both World Wars were fought because Europeans saw other Europeans as fundamentally different.
> But "Western" is wrong, because the same cultural sphere extends to Australia, New Zealand, and Russian Far East
Yes. And Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are viewed as "Western" in American discourse as well. The Russian Far East isn't though.
> From my perspective, as someone from the Northern fringes of Europe, Latin American society and culture feel fundamentally familiar
> Out of the Latin American countries I'm most familiar with, Peru feels more European...
Frankly, a Finn isn't the right person to make this distinction. And if you've been to Peru you most likely spent the bulk of your time in Miraflores and other European parts of Lima, and not the majority indigenous hinterland. The European-Indigenous fault line is a major faultline in Peru going back to the Shining Path days.
I've spent more time in the Andes than in Lima. The Quechua are clearly an indigenous group, but they have been forced to adopt most of the European cultural package. If you travel in Russia, you can find many ethnic groups in similar situations.
As European, I think America has an obligation to those that were already there, and all our ancestors helped to almost wipe out, those are the real native ones.
I had the impression that (at least some of) those groups contain people of mixed ancestry including European ancestry.
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?
Mixed Race is a separate census designation which represents an additional 10% of the US.
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...
Way more than 10%, because Hispanics are not considered mixed race even though most of us are.
> 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.
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.
"US-Asia trade already dwarfs US-Europe trade", that is not really true now is it? Here is a quote from John Hopkins foreign policy institute in their THE TRANSATLANTIC ECONOMY 2026 report: "The facts are straightforward but often ignored. The $9.8 trillion commercial relationship between the United States and Europe is by a wide margin the deepest, broadest, and most mutually beneficial between any two continents in history – and those ties are accelerating despite the headline noise." Source: https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Transatlantic-Eco... The EU is the worlds largest trading block, anyone is welcome not doing business with us, but it will likely be at your loss.
Do you not consider Roman Catholicism to be part of the European heritage? I sure do.
A lot of Latino Americans and indigenous people are Roman Catholics, so part of European heritage.
I don't understand why you mention "never had blood .. ties" when at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842245 you reject the relevancy of blood ties. Wouldn't your argument make more sense as just "never had ethnic ties with Europe.
As a reminder, Obama, African-American son of a white woman, once visited Moneygall, where an Irish ancestor lived, and said "My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas."
Lastly, I see you switched from "blood or ethic ties" to "heritage". Could you elaborate on what that means? Must I be Greek inherit some of the intellectual heritage of Ancient Greece? How is my claim to the traditional European liberal arts education heritage any stronger or weaker than that of W. E. B. Du Bois?
> African Americans make up around 15%
Almost all African Americans have some European heritage by blood. If you go to Africa you will see some truly dark skinned people, who haven't any European ancestry. How can you not have noticed this in a world of global broadcasts?
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.
They could have survived and thrived without colonialism or slavery or imperialism.