Nordisk Tidende was a Norwegian language newspaper in the United States founded in 1891 and closed in 1983. [1] In 1996, the Norwegian investment company that owned the Norway Times wanted to sell it, but the employees purchased the paper to keep it alive. The paper continued to serve its readers for another decade before it merged with Western Viking and the resulting publication became The Norwegian American in 2006. Some also report a daughter publication that opened in 1993 known as the Nordic Journal.
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is the official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional varieties, and some Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in particular, are very close. These Scandinavian languages, together with Faroese and Icelandic as well as some extinct languages, constitute the North Germanic languages. Faroese and Icelandic are hardly mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form because continental Scandinavian has diverged from them. While the two Germanic languages with the greatest numbers of speakers, English and German, have close similarities with Norwegian, neither is mutually intelligible with it. Norwegian is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era.
The Norwegian American (NA) is a newspaper that publishes material contributed by writers from Norway and the Norwegian American community. The Norwegian American is distributed on a biweekly basis by mail to thousands of subscribers in the USA, Canada and other parts of the world. NA continues what was once a very strong tradition of Norwegian American newspapers, as detailed by Pr. Odd Lovoll in his book Norwegian Newspapers in America: Connecting Norway and the New Land. At their height, Norwegian American newspapers had large local circulations and most of their content was in the Norwegian language. As such, Norwegian language newspapers formed part of what was once a very important body of non-English language periodicals.
The newspaper was founded by Emil Nilsen, an immigrant who came to the United States in 1887 to seek his fortune. As a previous book printer and sense of newspaper operations, it was natural that he started a newspaper for Norwegians in their new homeland. He saw that there was a need for Norwegians in the New York area to receive news from "the Old Country" written in Norwegian and decided to start Nordisk Tidende. Its first edition released 3 January 1891.
New York is a state in the Northeastern United States. New York was one of the original thirteen colonies that formed the United States. With an estimated 19.54 million residents in 2018, it is the fourth most populous state. In order to distinguish the state from the city with the same name, it is sometimes referred to as New York State.
In order to capture readers' interest, Nilsen filled his newspaper with drug rumors, scandals and popular gossip. His successors imposed a higher standard and more professional journalism, and the newspaper evolved into a respected publication that could offer their readers cultural fabric and news from two continents.
In 1930, Brooklyn had 63,000 residents of Norwegian descent. The newspaper was their main source of news from Norway, but World War II heightened the importance of the newspaper to its readership.
Brooklyn is the most populous borough of New York City, with an estimated 2,648,771 residents in 2017. Named after the Dutch village of Breukelen, it borders the borough of Queens at the western end of Long Island. Brooklyn has several bridge and tunnel connections to the borough of Manhattan across the East River, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connects it with Staten Island. Since 1896, Brooklyn has been coterminous with Kings County, the most populous county in the U.S. state of New York and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, after New York County.
Nordisk Tidende was the only free Norwegian newspaper published during World War II[ dubious ] and the only uncensored newspaper with the latest news from occupied Norway. Among the newspaper's writers at the time were Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset.
The German occupation of Norway during World War II began on 9 April 1940 after German forces invaded the neutral Scandinavian country of Norway. Conventional armed resistance to the German invasion ended on 10 June 1940 and the Germans controlled Norway until the capitulation of German forces in Europe on 8/9 May 1945. Throughout this period, Norway was continuously occupied by the Wehrmacht. Civil rule was effectively assumed by the Reichskommissariat Norwegen, which acted in collaboration with a pro-German puppet government, the Quisling regime, while the Norwegian King Haakon VII and the prewar government escaped to London, where they acted as a government in exile. This period of military occupation is in Norway referred to as the "war years" or "occupation period".
The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed in several categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances.
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.
As time passed and the first and second generation Norwegians died out, there was less need for a Norwegian language newspaper. The newspaper changed its name in 1991 to Norway Times and became an English-language weekly newspaper.
Nordisk Tidende had several editors over the years. Carl Søyland, among others, joined the newspaper in 1930 and was its editor from 1940 to 1963.
Norway Times' current editor is from Stavanger, Lene Heimlund Larsen.
Stavanger is a city and municipality in Norway. It is the third largest city and metropolitan area in Norway and the administrative centre of Rogaland county. The municipality is the fourth most populous in Norway. Located on the Stavanger Peninsula in Southwest Norway, Stavanger counts its official founding year as 1125, the year the Stavanger Cathedral was completed. Stavanger's core is to a large degree 18th- and 19th-century wooden houses that are protected and considered part of the city's cultural heritage. This has caused the town centre and inner city to retain a small-town character with an unusually high ratio of detached houses, and has contributed significantly to spreading the city's population growth to outlying parts of Greater Stavanger.
