Danish Americans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
|
1,516,126 0.5% of the U.S. population (2009) |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Utah, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin | |
| Languages | |
| English, Danish | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity (Protestantism, Catholicism, Mormonism) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Danes, Greenlanders, Greenlandic Americans, Danish Canadians, Danish Australians, Scandinavian Americans, Norwegian Americans, European Americans |
1,516,126
Danish Americans (Danish: Dansk-amerikanere) are Americans who have ancestral roots originated fully or partially from Denmark. There are approximately 1,500,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent.
The first Dane known to have arrived in North America was explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering (1681–1741). In 1728, he documented the narrow body of water that separated North America and Asia, which was later named the Bering Sea in his honor. Bering was the first European to arrive in Alaska in 1741. In 1666, the Danish West India Company took control of the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean and eventually, the islands of St. John in 1717 and St. Croix in 1733. The Danes brought African slaves to those islands, where the slaves were put to work in the snuff, cotton and sugar industries. These early settlers began to establish trade with New England. In 1917, they sold the islands to the United States, and they were renamed "U.S. Virgin Islands."
In the early seventeenth century, individual Danish immigrants became established in North America. Scandinavians, Danes and Norwegians in particular, made up a large portion of the settlers in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, now New York. After 1750, Danish families in the Protestant Moravian Brethren denomination immigrated to Pennsylvania, where they settled in the Bethlehem area alongside German Moravians. Until 1850, most Danes who emigrated to North America were unmarried men. During this period, some Danes achieved notability and recognition. Among them were Hans Christian Febiger (1749–1796), one of George Washington's most trusted officers during the American Revolution, Charles Zanco (1808–1836) who died at the Alamo in March 1836 in the struggle for Texan independence, and Peter Lassen (1800–1859), a blacksmith from Copenhagen who led a group of adventurers from Missouri to California in 1839. The trail established by Lassen was followed by the "forty-niners" during the California Gold Rush. Lassen is considered one of the most important early settlers of California.
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