Between 1850 and 1920, approximately 300,000 Danes immigrated to America to start new lives. Some of them dreamt of a new beginning with freedom, wealth and happiness. Others fled from unhappy events or past with crime.

Three half-hour documentaries in a 2018 DVD titled “Journey to America” tell some of those stories.

This is the English-language version of a television documentary produced in Denmark from extensive reporting and filming conducted across the United States two years ago. The series aired on Danish television in late 2017. The three-part series tells the stories of five immigrants and the Danish culture they created in America. They are Julius and Sophie Nielsen, 1886 immigrants to Potter, Nebraska; August Rasmussen, an 1856 immigrant to Greenville, Michigan; Kristina Beck, a 16-year-old who trekked across Nebraska to Utah Territory in 1868 as one of the more than 18,000 Danes converted by Mormon missionaries; Christen Madsen Rørmose, a repeat offender in Denmark who was shipped off to America as punishment in 1876 and who eventually became U.S. marshal for Oklahoma; and Jens Jensen, who designed key elements of the Chicago park system, worked with architect Frank Lloyd Wright and became a leading figure in landscape architecture in the early 20th century.

The project was inspired by the 2014 Danish best-seller “Rejsen til Amerika” (“The Journey to America”) by journalist and author Ole Sønnichsen, a recent board member of the Museum of Danish America. The book caught the attention of award-winning documentary filmmaker Lars Feldbelle-Petersen and his Film & TV Compagniet. Other partners include the Rebild National Park Society in Denmark and the Museum of Danish America. The museum helped raise about a third of the project’s $600,000 budget from the A.P. Møller Foundation in Denmark and the Scan Design Foundation in Seattle, Washington.