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INTRODUCTION
ONE day in the early fifties a New York publisher
put on the market a series of letters bearing the
double title, Homes of the New World; Impressions of
America. It was a voluminous work of about thirteen
hundred octavo pages, yet one that required five
printings within a month. Most Americans liked
the volumes, reviewers lauded and criticised, and
everybody read them. They were dedicated to "my
American friends"; dated in May, 1853, in Stockholm;
and signed, Fredrika Bremer.
On opening the books one found revealed a curiously
wide range of reading matter. Here was a conversation
with Emerson, there a criticism of a girls’ school;
here was an account of a negro camp-meeting, and there
of a Norwegian settlement in Wisconsin. Amos Bronson
Alcott was being advised to drink milk instead of
water to make his Transcendentalism less foggy, or the
author was watching the women smoke on a Mississippi
boat. A description of an Indian chief led to a
comparison of his wigwam with the Laplander’s hut
or of the heathen Chippewas with the Christianized
Choctaws, and one noted the remark in passing that
dyspepsia was the worst possible evil in any country
next to civil war. Here
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