United Stockholms of America began as a commissioned photography project for the Swedish Institute, documenting places across the United States that share their name with Sweden’s capital. The photographs were originally created for an exhibition at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, D.C.

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Between 1850 and 1930, approximately 1.3 million Swedes emigrated to America. The exhibition—and later the book—tells the stories of eight Stockholms in Maine, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa and Texas, several of them named by Swedish immigrants who settled there.

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Following the success of the exhibition, which traveled to five locations around the world before being auctioned for charity, Charlie Bennet brought the photographs and stories together in the coffee-table book United Stockholms of America — The Swedes Who Stayed. Published by Votum in 2014, the book became a permanent record of the project.