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This article considers colonial rhetoric manifested in representations of early settlement in the mining town of Kiruna in northernmost Sweden. Kiruna was founded more than 100 years ago by the LKAB Company with its centre the prosperous mine on Sami land. Continued iron ore mining has made it necessary to relocate the town centre a few kilometres north-east of its original location to ensure the safety of the people. The ongoing process of the town’s transformation due to industrial expansion has given rise to the creation of a memorial park between the town and the mine, in which two historical photographs have been erected on huge concrete blocks. For the Swedish Sami, the indigenous people, the transformation means further exploitation of their reindeer grazing lands and forced adaption to industrial expansion. The historical photographs in the memorial park fit into narratives of colonial expansion and exploration that represent the town’s colonial past. Both pictures are connected to colonial, racialised and gendered space during the early days of industrial colonialism. The context has been set by discussions about what Kiruna “is”, and how it originated. My aim is to study the role of collective memory in mediating a colonial past, by exploring the representations that are connected to and evoked by these pictures. In this progressive transformation of the town, what do these photographic memorials represent in relation to space? What are the values made visible in these photographs? I also discuss the ways in which Kiruna’s history becomes manifested in the town’s transformation and the use of history in urban planning. I argue that, in addressing the colonial history of Kiruna, it is timely to reconsider how memories of a town are communicated into the future by references to the past. I also claim that memory, history, and remembrance and forgetting are represented in this process of history-making and that they intersect gender, class and ethnicity.

”A new form of musical upbringing”: Pretenses of reform pedagogy content in the Siljan schoolIn this article, I describe the Siljan school in Tällberg as a Swedish example of alternative pedagogy. The overall questions relate to the reform pedagogy content of the school and its ability to give Swedish music teaching a new form of musical upbringing. An important issue is how the Siljan school as a model for Swedish reform has been inspired by the reform pedagogy movements in USA and Germany. The analysis is thus based on the Alm couple’s ability to give the school an international character which shines light on Swedish reforms in the greater context of reform pedagogy. With its basis in discursive education of the 1930s, two main questions are discussed: what perspective on musical education can be identified in the personal development ethos of the Siljan school? How can the school’s relation to the reform pedagogy music movement during the start of the 1900s be understood? From a hermeneutic perspective, the article contributes by investigating how the Siljan school can have affected decisions in education politics, Swedish schooling, and Swedish musical life. In summary, the article contributes with new knowledge on a chapter in the history of Swedish music pedagogy.

During the twenty-first century, large carnivores have increased in human dominated landscapes after being extinct or nearly extinct. This has resulted in increasing numbers of livestock killed by large carnivores. The intent of this paper is to give a land use-historical perspective on the recent livestock–carnivore conflict in boreal Sweden. More specifically we address: (1) depredation risks (livestock killed by carnivores) and (2) local knowledge of how to protect livestock from predation and whether it survived among pastoralists until the present. This study provides numeric information on carnivores, livestock and depredation, combined with oral information from summer farmers about livestock protection. We compare recent (since 1998) and historical (late nineteenth century) depredation rates in two Swedish counties. In Dalarna recent depredation rates are higher than historical rates while the opposite pattern is seen in Jämtland. Recent depredation rates in Dalarna are twice the recent rates in Jämtland, in contrast to the historical situation. Recent and historical depredation rates are of the same order. Summer farmers traditionally graze their livestock in forested areas where carnivores reside. Interviews show that traditional knowledge of how to protect livestock from carnivores was lost during the twentieth century, but recently new knowledge has developed leading to changes in summer farming practices. The carnivore–livestock situation today differs from the historical situation, not so much in levels of depredation, but mainly regarding the possibilities of farmers to face challenges associated with increasing carnivore populations.

Iron ore mining in the Norrbotten region of Sweden began in the early years of the twentieth century as a commercially uncertain and even dangerous proposition. But even before it began to generate profits, public debate began over the appropriate role of the state and of private capital (including foreign investors). This included whether iron ore should be exported for profit or retained for future processing in Sweden—even though the technology and infrastructure for such domestic industry did not exist. Tracing the evolution of this debate in the Swedish news media through to the First World War, this paper argues that the revenue generated by exports became more attractive than the promise of future domestic industry because that revenue could underwrite pressing political objectives. Although domestic iron ore processing remained linked to visions of future industrial prosperity, uncertain visions of future prosperity lost appeal as the capacity for export revenues to generate prosperity in the present became more potent.

Syftet med denna text är att problematisera riksdagens roll i svensk politisk historia, ca 1600–1900, och dess bidrag till utvecklingen mot demokrati och allmän rösträtt. För det första stärkte riksdagsrepresentanterna monarkin på riksdagens bekostnad vid flera tillfällen och bytte långsiktigt institutionellt inflytande mot vinster i enskilda sakfrågor. Vid andra tillfällen var de märkbart passiva och oförmögna att förhindra monarkin. Riksdagen utgjorde en tveksam och svag bastion för folkrepresentation och man kan hävda att riksdagen mellan 1611 och 1809 hade en svag ställning gentemot kungen i 94 år, nästan hälften av perioden. Detta förändrades dock mellan 1809 och 1866, trots att det fanns flera likheter i det politiska ramverket, samt politiska förutsättningar för ytterligare ett skifte till en stark monarki och en svag eller upplöst riksdag. Ståndsriksdagens sista 50 år utgör således en nyckelperiod om vi vill förstå varför riksdagen slutligen intog en stark ställning i den svenska politiska kulturen. Denna fråga berör inte bara historiker, utan också människor som är intresserade av hur och varför representativa församlingar blir lika eller mer legitima än auktoritära alternativ. Eftersom vi lever i en period där demokratiska institutioner och värderingar ifrågasätts är det viktigt att förstå hur de kom att omfamnas i första hand.

This study follows disabled individuals over their lifespan to examine their mortality risks in 19thcentury society, in comparison to non-disabled people. The aim is to detect whether people, due to their disability, had a higher probability of meeting a premature death. We use Sweden’s 19th-century parish registers to identify people the ministers defined as disabled, and employ theories on deviance and gender to grasp the statistical mortality findings. Disability significantly jeopardized the survival of individuals and particularly of men, probably because impairment limited their chances to match the breadwinner ideals associated with the male gender.

This issue of VIEW provides a critical survey of new digital humanities (DH) methods and tools directed toward audiovisual (AV) media. DH as a field is still dominated by a focus on textual studies (studies of word culture) that are largely “deaf and blind” in their capacity to search, discover, and study AV materials. The mandate to improve these capacities is clear and unquestioned, though the pathways are fecund and numerous. New and emergent tools related to deep learning algorithms are reasonably expected to change this methodological landscape within the digitally accelerated near-future.