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A major issue in Swedish and international research has, indeed, been the overriding purpose of social studies, along with the recurring discussion on whether the teaching of social studies should be organised in the individual subjects or be subject-integrated. The main aim of this article is to analyse how social studies as a specific field of study is featured in government commissions of inquiry and steering documents in the period 1980-2014. The analysis is primarily based on American and Nordic history and social studies education theory, which has identified a number of concepts regarding the purpose and organization of the social studies subject; the humanistic approach; the progressively approach; the disciplinary oriented approach and the postmodern and interpretive approach. The article is based on an analysis of national evaluations and reviews of social studies as well as curricula and government commissioned inquiries. The analysis shows that social studies as a knowledge domain is characterized by progressivism in the national evaluations in the whole period. Although curricula nowadays have a disciplinary perspective on the purpose and organization of social studies, progressivism is still prevalent in evaluations. It is clear that the public authorities responsible for the most recent inspections embrace progressivism. Concurrent with the predominance of certain education philosophies–progressivism in 1980-2011 and the disciplinary perspective from 2011– there are also traces of other approaches in the curricula, for example, the humanistic as well as the postmodern perspectives.

In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.

Titele in WoS: The metropolises of the Middle East

Slutreplik till Malin Thor Tureby om svensk-judisk historieforskning (se Vol. 31 nr 1 och 2).

How can the Danish lawn be read and interpreted through the last century? The cases vary a lot, therefore the cases reach out towards a general discussion.The investigation aims at exploring the Danish lawn in an international perspective, and lawns in landscape architecture or lawns as symbols signify critical points of view to societal matters.The present contribution explores the lawn as a central component in selected cases from 1915 till today. The modern breakthrough in the 1920s in Danish landscape architecture revitalized the lawn. Further artistic contributions in the 1950s launched the lawn in a delicate poetic edition. Only a few years later in the 1960s, the lawn signified the inhuman, industrialized suburb. The color TV in the 1980s made the lawn synonymous with commercial football and technology. In 2019, the lawn is an everyday thing, and parallelly it exists as the antonym to the ecological flower meadow – the “true” urban nature.

The age of imperialism, from the 1870s to the 1910s, saw the rise of a popular educational sphere in Sweden as well as in the rest of Europe. This sphere was characterised by an incomparable institutional growth and continuity. In earlier research, the growth of popular education has often been explained as a consequence of class-politics and the formation of a civil society. In this article I argue that another explanatory factor needs to be inserted in the overall historical narrative in Sweden, namely the material pre-conditions of the organisations that rose to stability and especially the economic grants offered by the industrial state. In fact, this study shows how the growth of the sphere and state grants to institutions such as folk high schools and lecture-societies went hand in hand. Furthermore it is shown how the share of public funding from the central bureaucracy as well as the local institutions of government successively became the dominant sources of income for folk high schools and lecture-societies. Thus, the article argues that the economic role of the state was a crucial factor for the rise of a continuous popular educational sphere.