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This article deals with the teaching of American history in Sweden. It focuses on developments at Uppsala University, where a course in American history has been taught since 1996, as a part of our American studies sequence. Placing it within the larger context of doing American studies in Sweden, it traces the development of the course discusses important topics taught and the challenges of finding suitable reading materials for students enrolled in the course.

Presidentvalet i USA har beskrivits som ett ödesval för den amerikanska demokratin. Det är ett val om konkreta politiska frågor, såsom ekonomi, socialförsäkringar och aborträtt. Men partikonventen för Demokraterna och Republikanerna visade att USA också står inför ett annat val i november – frågan om vad som definierar USA och vem som hör hemma i nationens gemenskap.

Studies of Swedish American history and identity have largely been confined to separate disciplines, such as history, literature, or politics. In Swedish–American Borderlands, this collection edited by Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén seeks to reconceptualize and redefine the field of Swedish–American relations by reviewing more complex cultural, social, and economic exchanges and interactions that take a broader approach to the international relationship—ultimately offering an alternative way of studying the history of transatlantic relations.

Swedish–American Borderlands studies connections and contacts between Sweden and the United States from the seventeenth century to today, exploring how movements of people have informed the circulation of knowledge and ideas between the two countries. The volume brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences to investigate multiple transcultural exchanges between Sweden and the United States. Rather than concentrating on one-way processes or specific national contexts, Swedish–American Borderlands adopts the concept of borderlands to examine contacts, crossings, and convergences between the nations, featuring specific case studies of topics like jazz, architecture, design, genealogy, and more.

By placing interactions, entanglements, and cross-border relations at the center of the analysis,Swedish–American Borderlands seeks to bridge disciplinary divides, joining a diverse set of scholars and scholarship in writing an innovative history of Swedish–American relations to produce new understandings of what we perceive as Swedish, American, and Swedish American.