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It is a difficult task to define the little word “modernity”. One may argue quite a lot about what modernity is as well as when modernity breaks trough. The burgess class was the group who initiated modernity in most cases. Since these people mainly dwelled in the cities it was in the cities were modernity started. The creation of an industry demanded new methods of working. Discipline, rationality and a new conscience of time followed as consequences of the industry. Modernity reached small towns and countryside slowly and the old structures were hard to break down. There are of course different aspects of modernity as the modernity of material life, the modernity of ideas and the modernity of culture. The modernity of material life tends to reach people before that of ideas or culture. In the small city of Visby existed many parts of modernity in the material life between 1880-1910. Telephones reached the city very early just like sewing machines or bicycles. Electricity lighted streets and homes just a few years after the turn of the century. Modern things seem to have reached the shopkeepers first, even before the upper class. The paper “Gotlands Allehanda” held a liberal view towards new ideas or writers and seems to have supported the enlightenment of the commons. The modern drama gained slowly ground among the many comedies on the local stage. But through the papers can we find many articles that indicate that Visby was a bit backward in many ways. Hogs were still housed in the streets and there were problems with clean water as well as public sanitary. So in many ways Visby before 1910 was modern on the surface and the old structures gave way only with difficulty.

My essay aims to explore, "What image is conveyed by the stone mason's life and work on Korpåsberget". In my essay I have been working with respondent interviews to examine the purpose. I've been trying to get interviewees to talk freely, but have also had a number of indicative questions for support. 

In order to process and understand the interviews, I also have a part in the essay aiming to provide background information to the stone industry in Bohuslän, an area along the westcoast in Sweden, and foremost in the area of Bovallstrand.

The text discusses the stone industry's development in the area, its development and the time until the stone industry at large was closed. As for the stone industry in Bovallstrand I have chosen to focus on the largest quarry in society, namely the Korpåsberget. The background text also briefly covers stonecutter’s lives and work. As a methodological viewpoint, I used literature on qualitative interviews. 

Then I will discuss a report on the content of each interview. I at the end of the work, I then go through interview responses and analyze them in relation to my questions and purpose. Based on the essay, other questions were raised which I have also responded to. The interviews have shown that the interviewees' attitude, commitment or lack of such, and their relationship to their father affects the interviews.

This paper is a study with two different aspects, with a main focus of the match factory in Jönköping. The first aspect is about how the work situation for children looked like in the match factory during the 1900 - century. The children´s work history over time, the children’s workday and life situation on the factory and outside is described in this paper. The second aspect in this paper is about how the pupils learn about their local history in the 3 and 4 grade. Do the teachers learn their pupils about the factory or not when they study their local history. If they do not, what causes have the teachers mentioned. Answers are too found in this paper.

The material concerning the questions if the match factory used children as workers in their production have I received from a visit on the match factory museum and from an interview with the manager of the museum. The manager also helped me find the material and he gave some information where to find more material as well. An interview with teachers in third to fifth grade in schools in and around Jönköping was the main thing in the second material study. The interview contained questions about how the teachers teach their pupils about local history and if they use the match factory in Jönköping as a complement to the education.

The study showed a lot of different perspectives of how teachers in and around Jönköping have chosen to or not to involve the match factory in the teaching of the local history of Jönköping. The study also show that the environment for young children during this time was very harsh. They had to work almost as much as older people with the same burden but for just a third of the salary, all because of the factory owner´s will to earn as much money as possible.

In May 1675, the local court in the northern Swedish parish of Nordingrå, which had approximately 1,000 inhabitants, held a preliminary investigation on 113 persons accused of witch-craft and superstition. For the majority of the 113, the main accusation was to have travelled to Blåkulla, a place where witches according to Swedish folklore participated in satanic festivities and rites led by the Devil himself. The preliminary investigation was held at the request of The Royal Witch-craft Commission. Nordingrå belonged to the province of Ångermanland, one of the Swedish provinces with the highest number of witch trials in the 1670s. The trials in Nordingrå have, more or less never been examined before, mainly due to the fact that no sentences or penalties were ever imposed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine social relations and social conflicts in Nordingrå with the records from the witch trial 1675 as the primary source. The theoretical background for the paper is Emmanuel Le Roy Laduries study of the Occitan village of Montaillou along with Hannah Arendts theory on the banality of evil.

One of the paper´s main conclusion is that the relations of power can be traced in the trials, but that they, on the other hand, become less significant the further the trials go. One reasonable interpretation of this fact is that the trials in Nordingrå reflects the tendence of juridical centralization in the 17th century.

The social conflicts in the parish are more obvious in the accusations of superstitions than in the accusations of travels to Blåkulla. For example the conclusion can be drawn that at least a number of inhabitants in Nordingrå had a religion on their own, which did not always match the orthodoxy of the Protestant church. At the same time the accusations of superstition do not play a particularly important role in the trials. The main impression of the trials is, on the contrary, that they do not follow a given pattern regarding who can be put on trial, except for the fact that most of the trialed were women. Against the accused, a number of at least 173 witnesses appeared, most of them children and young people under the age of 24. The witnesses in general did not only tell the court which crimes the accused witches had committed, but also which crimes they had committed themselves.

The aim of this study is to learn about the nineteenth century poor relief system, how itoperated in the rural parish Kristdala during the period 1881-1890, and not least, who was thesupported person? The poor are defined as the individuals that received public poor relief, but in onechapter this definition of poverty is contrasted with a definition based upon tax exemption:inability to pay taxes. Two villages have been selected for intensive study, namely Kroxhult and Calerum, and Calerum is the smaller one. The connection between age and the poverty ratio is clear, and tobe a lodger was especially disadvantageous with respect to poverty. Further the position ofwidow was the most unfavourable among the female poor people. In Kroxhult the singlepersons were often supported and here the most ordinary receiver of poor relief was a man.Probably the local government wanted to press down the expenses, but then the parishhas kept within the law. For payment some farmers took care of adults and children, but therewas a poor-house. It appears to me that sometimes women more easily got poor relief, and Ihave found that a person who was regarded to have a disordered lifestyle could be sent to aworkhouse.

In the New Testament different pictures of a Christian woman are presented, not only thepicture of someone who is nursing and caring, but also the picture of someone who is learningand being educated.Women are put into systems of gender which form them, and throughout the years the pictureof women has been that they primarily should be caring and nursing, not learning.Both of these pictures exist within the Swedish Missionary Society, a society that has not hadany constitution to comply with until 1964, which meant that each person could make his owninterpretation of the Bible and its texts.This essay examines how fifty-year-old women are pictured within the Swedish MissionarySociety 1945-1970, assuming that women who want to serve Jesus have to be prepared togive up their traditional role of nursing and caring, and focus on learning instead.The research method is qualitative, and the written sources are from a regional Christianweekly publication. The essay does not present an unambiguous picture of fifty-year-oldnonconformist women, but the results show that they are not being related to children, that themajority has a higher education than elementary school, and that many of them are addressedto as “Mrs”.

Questions about discipline have always been current within the Swedish school system, from the sixteenth century until today. The purpose of this study is to compare the discipline in two old-time elementary schools, located on Gotland, with each other.

This study will compare an old-time elementary school from the countryside with an old-time elementary school from a town to show the differences in discipline between the coun-tryside and a town. This study will also focus on how questions about discipline changes from 1847 to 1937/1941. In order to do so I have studied the regulations from the two schools and compared them with each other. When I discuss discipline I will use Michel Foucault’s theory concerning the development of power and discipline in modern society.

My study shows that it did not differ much in questions of discipline between the two ex-amined old-time elementary schools. However, changes in discipline between the two ex-amined periods are evident. Changes in society that follows in the footprints of liberalism and democratic progress are prominent in the latter period that I have studied. These changes in society have obviously effected questions about discipline as they appear in the regulations. The early form of discipline, often in the shape of a salient teacher using force to discipline the pupils, has transformed into a more subtle form of discipline. A new way to carry out dis-cipline, that uses other indirect forms of discipline such as grades and examinations, are tak-ing form during the nineteenth century and are probably still doing so.

Politicians Week in Visby has since the late 1960s developed to be a fairly unique concept in Swedish politics, which even in recent years has begun to be exported to other countries in Europe. Curiosity and interest around the arrangement of activities and actors have in the past decade become increasingly both nationally and internationally. The purpose of this study has therefore been to find out how “Almedalsveckan” as a political arrangement emerged and developed. The question that the study mainly tries to answer is how “Almedalsveckan” became a concept of the open democratic meeting between politicians, citizens, journalists and various organizations in the Swedish society. To find out, mainly newspaper articles from the Gotland newspapers has been used, as well as an interview with the former municipal politician Jan Lundgren (s) has been made. Source material has also been obtained from the Library of Almedalen in the Gotlandica department, “Almedalsveckan” official website, Gotland Tourist, SCB and SIKA. The investigation has been defined to include the election-years for the period 1968 - 2009 but other years have also been used to see how political participation has been in non-election year and in 2009 to root development at the present time. The results from the survey show how the arrangement evolved to this stage as a meeting place for political debate in which politicians, citizens, journalists and various organizations engaged in informal conversations.