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New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony

75 pointsby bookofjoeyesterday at 7:26 PM23 commentsview on HN

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anyonecancodetoday at 1:49 AM

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...

Electricnikotoday at 2:21 AM

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

zkmontoday at 4:12 AM

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.

reaperducertoday at 3:40 AM

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.

comrade1234yesterday at 11:26 PM

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.

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