Augustana College is a private liberal arts college located in Rock Island, Illinois, United States. The college enrolls approximately 2,500 students. Covering 115 acres of hilly, wooded land, Augustana is adjacent to the Mississippi River. Ninety-one percent of the full-time faculty hold Ph.D.s or the terminal degrees in their field. After 1890 an increasingly large Swedish American community in America promoted a new institutional structure, including a lively Swedish-language press, many new churches, several colleges, and a network of ethnic organizations. The result was to foster with... pride a sense of Swedishness in the United States. Thereby there emerged a self confident Americanized generation. Augustana College put itself in the lead of the movement to affirm Swedish American identity. Early on all the students had been born in Sweden but by 1890 the second generation of American-born students predominated. They typically had white-collar or professional backgrounds; few were the sons and daughters of farmers and laborers.
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