The West has always been a resource for the Finns. Scholars, artists and other professionals have sought contacts from Europe throughout the centuries. The Finnish experience in Western Europe and the New World is a story of migrant laborers, expatriates and specialists working abroad. But you don't have to be born in Finland to be a Finn. The experiences of second-generation Finnish immigrants and their descendants open up new possibilities for understanding the relationship between Finland and the West. The Finnish passage westward has not always crossed national borders. Karelian evacuees headed west, as did young people from the Finnish countryside when opportunities to make a living in agriculture and forestry diminished in the post-war era. The legacy of these migrants is still visible in the suburbs of Finnish cities today. This book is a joint effort of the Department of Ethnology and the Department of History at the University of Helsinki. It was written by Ph. D. students supervised by Academy Research Fellows Maria Lähteenmäki and Hanna Snellman, in collaboration with colleagues abroad interested in current research in ethnology and history.

Hanna Snellman is Vice Rector and Professor of Ethnology at the University of Helsinki. Snellman's research since the 1990s has focused on the ethnography of mobility, especially Finnish Lumberjacks and Finnish immigrants to Sweden and North America, and the History of European Ethnology. In addition to several articles and book chapters, she has published four monographs including Khants' Time (2000) and The Road Taken (2005), and co edited several volumes and special issues such as Journal of Finnish Studies issues The Making of Finland: The Era of the Grand Duchy (2018) and Bittersweet: Everyday Life and Nostalgia for the 1950s (2016).