After 1850 the number of Scandinavian newspapers and religious periodicals multiplied rapidly. Langeland, himself an editor and publisher of the time, mentions five of these publications on the Norwegian side alone in the decade following 1850.[307] _Skandinaven_, whose foundation marks an era in the Scandinavian press, dates back to this period. From its small beginnings has grown a great metropolitan daily, with a circulation of 20,000, besides its semi-weekly and weekly editions which have a circulation all over the Northwest of nearly 50,000.[308] In the ten years after 1870, a second expansion in the number of publications took place, tho the fifteen Scandinavian papers given in the list published in the standard newspaper directory for 1870, make an almost insignificant showing by the side of the two hundred and fifty or more printed in America in German.[309] [307] Langeland, _Nordmændene i Amerika_, 96-112. [308] "Den skandinaviske tidnings-pressens barndom i Amerika," _Hemlandet_, Feb. 25, March 4, 1913; Hansen and Wist, "Den Norsk-Amerikanske Presse". _Norsk-Amerikanernes Festskrift_, 1914. 9-203. [309] Rowell, _American Newspaper Directory_, 1870, 948. The Swedish press in the United States began somewhat later than the Norwegian, but it manifested a stability and steadiness of progress which the latter too often lacked. _Hemlandet_ was founded in 1855 as an organ of Swedish Lutheranism, but in 1870 it was a political as well as a religious journal, with 4,000 subscribers to the weekly edition, and 2,000 to the monthly,--"the largest circulation of any Swedish political newspaper in this country."[310] [310] _Ibid._, 633. The high-water mark in the number of these publications in the Northern tongues seems to have been in 1892 or 1893, when Rowell mentions 146, of which Minnesota is credited with 33, Illinois with 30, Iowa with 13, and Wisconsin with 10, a total for these four States of 86, with a reported total of 140,000 subscribers, out of 550,000 subscribers for all the Scandinavian papers in the country. By 1901, the number of papers had fallen off--many suspended in the hard times after 1893[311]--but the number of subscribers increased for the whole country to more than 800,000, and for the four States just enumerated, to more than 650,000.[312] [311] _The North_, Aug. 9, 1893, reports six weeklies "suspended within the past few weeks." [312] Rowell, _American Newspaper Directory_ for years named; _Hemlandet_, Mar. 4, 1903: "De svenska tidningarne i Amerika har nu sammenlagt en prenumerantsiffra som uppgår till 400,000."