Scandia : Tidskrift för historisk forskning
Scandia is scholarly history journal dedicated to central themes within historical research in the Nordic countries. The emphasis is on Nordic and European history, on theory and method, and on historiography. The journal is issued twice a year. Scandia is classified as a level 1 journal according to the Norwegian Register. Scandia transitioning to immediate Open Access In recent years, each issue of Scandia became digitally available through Open Access after a six-month delay. The Swedish Research Council has pushed for the increased accessibility of research, and the editorial staff wants to contribute to this effort. Therefore, from 2025, each issue will immediately become available as Open Access. New issues will also be available for purchase through print-on-demand. For those of you who like to read Scandia in its physical format, you will still be able to subscribe to the printed version of Scandia. However, subscription fees will be increased to cover the additional costs involved in printing. The subscription fees for 2025 will be SEK 350 within the Nordic region and SEK 425 for other subscribers. For students, the price will be SEK 250. Wiebke Kolbe, Editor and Liesbeth Geevers, Chair of the board Important notice: Publishing in Scandia is always free of charge Scandia: Tidskrift för historisk forskning does not use a pay-to-publish model. If you have been contacted by someone who has required you to pay to publish your article, this is a scam by external actors pretending to be from Scandia. We encourage you to report the incident to the police.
Monographs Aaron Isaac: Sveriges förste jude Historiedidaktik och historieundervisning: Förutsättningar, utmaning, möjligheter Efterkrigstider Kvinnoriket: Historien om kvinnor i Sverige under tusen år Kärlekens tid: Dröm och verklighet under två tusen år En herre på visit: Sällskapslivet i bourgeoisiens formering i Sverige och Finland under 1800-talet Longing for the Scaffold: Interpretations of and Reactions to Crimes Committed in Order to be Executed Anthologies Det dolda universitetet: Militär forskning i kalla krigets Sverige Weaving it together: Histories of the textile industry in Sweden and international Perspectives Dissertations Att skola entreprenörer: Ung Företagsamhet och den svenska skolans omvandling 1980–2011 Vad gör museipedagogen och föremålen med historien? Historieundervisning på fyra kulturhistoriska museer 2015–2017 När svensk tekoindustri konkurrensutsattes: Arbetsgivarorganisationer inför föränderliga marknadskontexter 1955–1995 På samma klot? Lantbrukskunskaper i 1720-talets Sverige Mindre uppmärksammade historiska jubileer. Tecknad av Fredrik Tersmeden
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Scandia utblick. Swedish Fashion History Today
The field of Swedish fashion history is expanding more than ever before, but it remains a small and vulnerable environment. Few researchers devote themselves to fashion history as their main area of expertise. Fashion history is a relatively new field of research with roots in ethnology, art history, and museums. Today, there is a Swedish fashion history network, but the environment needs to be strengthened with doctoral projects and more collaboration. For a long time, fashion was associated with superficiality in both everyday life and in academia. Fashion was therefore not seen as an important social phenomenon until the 1980s, when British researchers published significant studies. This also influenced the emergence of the field in Sweden. For a long time, fashion historians focused on studies of fashion in relation to constructions of femininity, while men’s clothing was overlooked. Since the end of the 2000s, this has changed, both internationally and in Sweden. Today, a great deal of research is being conducted on men’s fashion in Sweden, given the size of the field. The main criticism, however, is that fashion history research is Eurocentric, both in terms of the places studied and the narrative of fashion’s development. For a long time, the idea that fashion only existed in the Western world has characterized research. This has been debated since ”the global turn”, and has resulted in a broadening of the field of fashion history.
Scandia introduces. Handwritten Text Recognition and Processing with Large Language Models: Sources from New Sweden
This article describes a pilot study in which records from the Swedish National Archives concerning the colony of New Sweden (1638–1655) were transcribed, translated, and summarised using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) via Transkribus and the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT. The project was carried out within the framework of ”Empire”, a research project at Trinity College Dublin that examines Ireland’s role in the building of the English empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aim was to test how effectively these tools could be used to process this extensive material (over 130 folio pages) with documents in Swedish, German, Dutch, and Latin. The article explains the choice of HTR models, particularly how a combination of Transkribus and transformer-based models such as ”Text Titan I” and ”Swedish Lion I” were used to optimise speed and reach a level of acceptable accuracy. An important aspect was to assess the ability of LLMs to summarise and translate fragmentary and partially illegible texts, as well as to weigh accuracy against efficiency. The article also presents an example from a 1643 court case between Governor Johan Printz and the English merchant George Lamberton, demonstrating the method’s potential for interpreting complex sources. Finally, the author discusses the future potential of this technology and possible avenues for further development, emphasising that although the technology requires human oversight, it is a powerful labour-saving tool that can transform how historical material is made accessible and analysed.
Scandia debate: The Sweden Democrats’ White Paper is far from Being a Reckoning with the Party’s Past
The Sweden Democrats’ white paper, announced by party leader Jimmie Åkesson in 2017, has generated significant discussion by revisiting key aspects of the party’s history. Although these issues have been addressed in previous research, their reiteration remains relevant. Authored by historian of ideas Tony Gustafsson, the white paper employs comprehensive source analysis to demonstrate the Sweden Democrats’ documented connections to National Socialism, the persistence of anti-Semitic attitudes, and the prevalence of xenophobic rhetoric. However, the scope and temporal limitations imposed by the party leadership have resulted in the exclusion of several critical topics. Gustafsson was instructed by party leadership to address only specific areas of criticism. Additionally, the report concludes in 2010, rendering the party’s more recent developments largely unexamined. Notably, the white paper provides minimal attention to the party’s criticism of Islam, which has frequently bordered on Islamophobia and has been a recurring theme since the early 2000s. The analysis also omits discussion of the Sweden Democrats as a populist party. Right-wing populist parties often employ a strategy that emphasizes national values while portraying immigrants as threats introduced by so-called national traitors. The increasing dissemination of conspiracy theories within party rhetoric, particularly as the welfare state narrative has diminished in influence, is similarly overlooked. As historical narratives such as the retrotopic welfare state have been supplanted by historical distortions, including claims that the Swedish Social Democrats inspired Nazi Germany to the Holocaust, and by conspiracy theories, there is a heightened need for critical examination of the Sweden Democrats’ ideological positions regarding nationalism, populism, and fascism.
Scandinavian Children ”Out-of-Place”? Historical Perspectives on Contested Repatriations of Scandinavian Children Born of War
Children born to enemy soldiers, so-called ”children born of war”, are vulnerable to displacement. The contested repatriations of the children of Scandinavian mothers and foreign fighters from Syria in the wake of the fall of ISIS in March 2019 represent a case in point. Norway, Denmark and Sweden initially delayed and then only hesitantly or selectively supported their return – just as Norway and Denmark had done with displaced Scandinavian children born to German soldiers after World War II. The contexts differ, but the echoes in the controversies regarding the respective children’s right to return ask us to look at the histories of Scandinavian-German children’s displacement in Allied-occupied Germany in new ways and to broaden our understanding of Scandinavian children ”out-of-place” today beyond security paradigms. The main focus of this paper rests on the post-1945 Danish and, to a lesser degree, Norwegian cases of children’s displacement and repatriation from Germany. By analysing the International Refugee Organization’s meeting minutes, case files, correspondence and the documentation of two Danish repatriation family histories in the late 1940s, I trace how the specific perceptions of these children as ”children born of war” informed their national and familial affiliation, their access to IRO support as well as their final placement. Building on existing scholarship on the contested repatriations of displaced Norwegian children from Germany after 1945, my analysis adds: 1) new archival research on Danish cases of displacement, and 2) a transnational perspective on how a parental enemy stigma shaped the negotiations on the children’s repatriations between IRO staff and family members in the absence of the state showing an interest in their return. These insights shed new light on the root causes behind the controversies around the national and familial belonging of Scandinavian children ”out-of-place” that apply to the post-45 generation but also affect the region’s children of ISIS foreign fighters as ”children born of war.” The results thus open up new lines of research for future comparative scholarship on the rights and inclusion of different groups and generations of displaced Scandinavian children.
Cultivated Love: A Microhistorical Study of Letters from a Swedish Noble Family, 1918–1921
This article examines a collection of over 300 private letters by three different writers from 1918 to 1921, inherited from the Swedish noble family of Hjärne. It aims to microhistorically understand the widow Amalia Hjärne (1859–1944), her opinions, values, and influence on her two sons’ engagements. First, it retells a mésalliance between the future Chancellor of Justice Karl-Gustaf Hjärne (1892–1977) and a peasant’s daughter from Dalarna, Skräddar Anna Larsdotter (1892–1946). Second, a more ideal or typical engagement between a lieutenant, Bo Urban Hjärne (1889–1978), and a younger, bourgeoisie banker’s daughter in Halmstad, Karin Afzelius (1899–1987). In the latter case, the letters between the engaged couple are extant and interpreted, while only Amalia’s letters remain to examine the former. Through her letters, it becomes apparent that she values social and cultural capital more than economic capital in her son’s choices of fiancées, even though the Hjärne family is seriously indebted. This confirms and elaborates on previous historical and ethnological research on nineteenth-century Swedish nobility, showing that manners, language, education, and culture became more important than wealth in maintaining their declining social standing. The article also demonstrates Amalia’s agency within her own family, as she laments and opposes the engagement with the farmer’s daughter. Simultaneously, she supports the engagement with the banker’s daughter economically and as a new mother and mentor to Karin, who deals with the sudden loss of her parents. Comparisons are made in part with early twentieth-century Swedish literature. Although Amalia, Urban and Karin are partially contextualized as representatives of their classes, they are also treated with empathy as individuals with their distinct personalities and voices. This is done in the spirit of microhistory, existential history, and hermeneutics, research traditions whose similarities are discussed within a Swedish frame.
The Propaganda of the Deed and its Limits: The Young Socialist Movement in Scania, 1906–1908
Violence and confrontational methods have generally been regarded as undesirable within the Swedish labour movement. Yet during a brief period in the early twentieth century such tactics became the subject of intense debate within the Young Socialists, the Social Democratic Party’s first youth organisation. Distrustful of parliamentary reformism, many activists instead promoted rapid, disruptive interventions in public life – what they termed ”propaganda of the deed”. After a split in 1903, when a more party-loyal faction left, Scania (Skåne) emerged as the movement’s stronghold for the remaining radical groups, and between 1906 and 1908 several spectacular actions involving violence were carried out there. This article focuses on three incidents: Two antimilitarist demonstrations in Helsingborg in 1906 that led to long prison sentences under newly introduced legislation against antimilitarist propaganda; a postal train robbery near Staffanstorp in 1907 in which a postal worker was seriously wounded and that resulted in two Young Socialists being sentenced to life imprisonment; and the 1908 bombing of the strikebreaker ship Amalthea in Malmö harbour, which caused one death and several injuries and led to two Young Socialists being sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. These events provoked widespread political and media debate and deeply alarmed the Social Democratic leadership. Using these cases, this study analyses how violence as a political instrument was discussed by local Young Socialists, asking what ”propaganda of the deed” meant in practice, how internal and external debates unfolded, and where the boundaries of legitimate political action were drawn. The article situates these discussions within broader historiographical debates on Swedish political culture and political violence, challenging portrayals of the labour movement as uniformly reformist and of twentieth-century Sweden as dominated by a consensual political tradition. Drawing on concepts such as framing and boundary activation, it explores how political culture shaped both the justification and rejection of violent methods within the movement.
The Great Power Age of Sweden through the Ages: A Sketch of its Historiography
In Swedish history, the 17th century is usually named stormaktstiden (Great Power Age) and Sweden of the time is called a stormakt (great power). This terminology is not evident and it has a history. Before the middle of the 19th century, historians did not denote the 17th century as an age of any specific greatness, although king Gustav II Adolf was lauded for his performance in the Thirty Year’s War. The concept ”great power” came into being at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and was used about contemporary European foreign politics. In Sweden, it came into use common use in the 1850s. Around 1870, stormakt and stormaktstid were used to denote the Swedish 17th century and that usage made its way into historical works in the next decade. Originally, historians seem to have been aware of the fact that this was a symbolic use of a terminology of contemporary politics, but soon in the early 20th century, it had become a commonplace to name 17th century Sweden a great power and see the Great Power Age as an age of Swedish greatness. The use of this terminology has since than accelerated, while the positive connotations of Greatness largely disappeared in the middle of the last century. Instead, the negative consequences of Sweden’s projection of power outside its borders, both for its neighbours and its subjects, are often stressed. There is a lack of precision and clarity in the use of this terminology. ”Great power” is seldom defined by historians. There are diverging statements as to just how great the Swedish great power was. Some historians state that Sweden was one of the leading powers in Europe, while others, more realistically, confine it to a leading role in the Baltic area. None of these claims are, however, based on any deeper arguments about Sweden’s place in a European political context. Since Sweden in the 17th century took lively part in the development of the emerging European state system, a system of global historical significance since it has come to cover the entire earth, studies of Sweden’s power politics in a transnational perspective could bring important contributions to the scholarly field of global history.
The Editor in Chief discusses the current issue. A list of contributors can also be found here.
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Framställningen av tiden 1654-1660 i Sveriges Historia till våra dagar.
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Svenska kyrkan under Erik XIV. Översikt över nyare forskningar och försök till en omvärdering
Nogle Synspunkter for dansk merkantilistisk Erhvervspolitik.
Fältherrar, härorganisation och krigföring under trettioåriga krigets senare skede. En orientering.
Den rostockska sändebudsberättersen om vardemar Atterdags förhandlingar med Magnus Eriksson.
Arkivordningsprincip er. Historisk återblick och nyorientering.
Monographs Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, 900–1550: Between two Oceans Att planera ett krig: Hur de tänkte, hur det blev. Från Napoleon till vår egen tid Hela människor: Patientmötet i behandling av psykisk ohälsa från sent 1700-tal till 1924 Kampen om gaderne: Propaganda, protest og politisk vold i 1930’erne Barnavård till salu: Förlossningshem och barnpensionat 1900–1975 Kvinnorna runt Vasatronen Begäret efter det förflutna: retrofili och queer temporalitet i 2000-talets historievurm Anthologies Boghistorie i Skandinavien Religious Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Nordic Countries: Reason and Orthodoxy Transnational Feminism in Non-English Speaking Europe, c.1960–1990 Dissertations Navigating Injustice: Responses to the Holocaust in the Swedish-Jewish press, 1945–1967 Mindre uppmärksammade historiska jubileer. Tecknad av Fredrik Tersmeden
Scandia utblick: What is tourism history?
Tourism history is witnessing a surge of new research, which means that this is a good time to pause and reflect on the historiographical development of this field over the past decades. This article retraces the genealogy of historical tourism scholarship, revisits some of the classics in the field, and reviews the latest developments in the global historiography on tourism. Furthermore, the article also shows how the field has always engaged in productive, mutual exchanges with other disciplines, including sociology, ethnology, and comparative literature, and with adjacent historical fields such as global history, gender history, and diplomatic history. It also argues that while researchers for a long time were in agreement when seeing tourism as an inherently modern phenomenon, recent research on European antiquity and the Song dynasty has prompted a new debate on the nature of tourism. The empirical emphasis of most tourism history nevertheless remains on the period after 1850, and the article ends by staking out the latest trends in this field, such as the embrace of digital methods and the study of so-called travellees – those on the receiving end of tourism who facilitate or merely witness their home becoming a destination for mass travel.
Scandia introduces: Historical game studies. History in, with, and of (digital) games
This article presents historical game studies as a research field in which games are analysed as media related to historical representation and practice. By combining perspectives from game studies, history, and heritage research, the article examines how games not only depict but also influence understandings of the past. It outlines the development of the field and its key theoretical foundations and methodological challenges, with a particular focus on how the form and function of games interact with historical narratives. The article introduces the concepts of developer-historian and player-historian to describe how both game developers and players contribute to the construction of history in games. Frameworks for historical representation are created through design choices, rules, and interactivity, while players actively interpret and renegotiate the historical content. This dual process allows games to be analysed both as staged history and as historical practice. The article also explores how counterfactual scenarios are used in games to test alternative historical developments, which, in turn, raises questions concerning causality, credibility, and the role of games in historical culture. The counterfactual structure of games is contrasted with documentary and didactic games, which focus on conveying specific events or historical knowledge. These different forms of expression are understood as part of a broader historical-cultural context in which games serve as media in relation to contemporary ideas about the past. The article further addresses the use of games in digital heritage work, where game engines and technologies such as VR and AR are employed to reconstruct historical environments. These applications demonstrate how games may contribute to the visualisation and communication of material culture, both in research and public engagement. Finally, the article discusses the significance of game culture for historical game studies. Practices such as modding, streaming, and participating in online forums show that players constitute active co-creators of historical narratives. The content and function of games are shaped in interaction with the surrounding culture, which makes it necessary to include game-cultural perspectives in the analysis of historical games. By highlighting these aspects, the article shows how historical games serve as complex media in which history is not only represented but also processed, renegotiated, and experienced in new ways.
Scandia debate: Intentions Between Source and Interpreter. A Response to Tonicha Upham
This article serves as a response to Tonicha Upham’s comments on my previous publication in Scandia (91:1, 2025). While Upham suggests that I should have engaged more directly with Ibn Faḍlān’s original Arabic text, I emphasise that the aim of my article was not to reconstruct the source but to demonstrate how the intentions of interpreters inevitably shape the ways in which sources are read. I also address two additional points: the reasons why Kovalevskiy rendered the sacrificial victim as a “girl” rather than a “slave” in his translation of Ibn Faḍlān’s account of a Rus’ funeral, as well as the possible circumstances surrounding Kovalevskiy’s arrest.
Scandia debate: Translation, Interpretation, and the Politics of Ibn Faḍlān. A Reply to Maksym Kyrychenko (Scandia debatt 2025:1)
A response to a debate piece by Makysm Kyrychenko (Scandia 2025:91:1) on historiographical interpretations of the Rūs of Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān’s tenth-century Arabic travel account as Slavic Severians, this essay engages with the historiography of Ibn Faḍlān between 1814 and 1956 in order to offer nuance to these Severian readings. Acknowledging that the Rūs as they appear in Ibn Faḍlān’s eyewitness account have long been open to interpretation, I focus in the first instance on who Ibn Faḍlān understands them to be. Tracing the development of European scholarship on Ibn Faḍlān against political priorities and the various resonances of the concept of “Rūs”, I outline some of the key factors affecting the source as it moved through translations in various languages. As a text which is primarily accessed in translation, the historiography of Ibn Faḍlān has been flattened and oversimplified; by returning to the first manuscripts used to facilitate his study in both Denmark and Russia, I work to establish a more detailed understanding of how the text was used, received, and transmitted. To this I also add further detail on the 1923 identification of the Mashhad identification, drawing attention to the political ramifications of the Russian and German translations of Ibn Faḍlān which were both published in 1939. From here, and this expanded historiographical groundwork, I reflect briefly on some of the arguments presented for the Severian identity of Ibn Faḍlān’s Rūs. While these arguments have long since been abandoned – and with good reason – it is instructive to consider how the journey from text and manuscript to accessible translation influenced some of these interpretations. It is also helpful, moreover, to emphasise just how important it is to consider both textual and manuscript contexts and the Arabic language itself in discussion of these interpretations. This is, I argue, a critical step advancing understandings of Ibn Faḍlān, regardless of how his Rūs are interpreted.
Parliamentarism in the Swedish debate and the political use of history up until the Second World War
In many studies in the field of the history of ideas and the history of political thought, the history of parliamentarism begins in the eighteenth century. However, the word parliamentarism was not used before the latter part of the nineteenth century. Since that time, parliamentarism has been a controversial concept, and struggles over its meaning and value make an important part of the history of democratisation. Thus, it is important to consider a conceptual history perspective when using “parliamentarism” as an analytical concept. In Sweden, struggles over the meaning of “parliamentarism” played a particularly important role in the half-century preceding the Second World War. This was a period of parliamentary democratisation in Sweden. This article presents a conceptual history analysis focusing on how historical actors viewed the system of government they described as based on parliamentarism. We show that the struggle over “parliamentarism” largely involved different interpretations of the national political tradition, even concerning periods before the term existed. Past political actors used history-political arguments to strengthen their own arguments, thus making them appear to be in line with historical tradition. We highlight the brief history of “parliamentarism” as an -ism and discuss several key points: how the so-called dualism of the 1809 Instrument of Government was interpreted in the early twentieth century as a Swedish version of parliamentarism; how the age of parliamentarism was retroactively extended to the Age of Liberty; how the emergence of parliamentarism was linked to the practical reforms in the nineteenth century and the idea of the so-called living constitution; how the minority governments in the 1920s were seen as part of the contemporary theories of parliamentarism; and how parliamentarism, during the debates in the 1930s on the crisis of democracy, was presented as an integral part of Sweden’s imagined old democratic tradition. Foreign political systems were used when constructing this national tradition, serving both as models and as warning examples. Thus, the shaping of Swedish parliamentarism was a highly transnational rhetorical process.