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This article introduces a variety of Romani groups living in Soviet Ukraine and their ways of life—sedentary, semi-nomadic and nomadic—highlighting that semi-nomadism is omitted category in scholarship even though most of the Roma in Soviet Ukraine maintained a semi-nomadic way of life. Through the discussion of the notion of nomadism, the research analyses how the Romani ways of life have changed over time from before and after the Second World War. Examining the Soviet policy towards the Roma in Soviet Ukraine (1930s–1950s), particularly, the creation of the kolkhoz system and the issue of the “Khrushchev Decree”, the paper argues that the changes in Romani ways of life occurred due to suppressive policies of the Soviet state directed to the forced sedentarisation of Roma.

This thesis explores the Swedish Institute’s construction of a national narrative of Sweden and the war and how it changed over time by comparing three time periods, 1939-1945, 1946-1959, 1960-1969. The adapting narrative of World War II serves to illustrate changes in the Swedish Institute’s projected Swedish identity, focusing on neutrality as an intrinsic component. Creating a national narrative to compliment Sweden’s image served to strengthen Sweden’s international reputation. Thus the Swedish Institute’s narrative of Sweden and the war adjusts according to the changing contexts. Ultimately the Swedish Institute constructed a narrative that was complimentary to the image of Sweden they intended to promote internationally.

To get a more complex and realistic picture of earlier societies we have to include variations on sexuality and gender presentation. Love between women is often overlooked by historians and has been sparsely studied in Sweden. This study focuses on the word “lesbian” during the period 1850-1950, during which it went from being one of several terms for love between women to being the most common word for female homosexuality. The study illustrates how love between women is conceptualized in Swedish popular culture through a conceptual history of the use of the word “lesbian” in Swedish newspapers.

The source material is collected through a search on the term “lesbi*” in Kungliga Bibliotekets (the Royal Library’s) newspaper database, where the articles giving homosexual meaning to the word “lesbian” are found and selected. The analysis is made both through a broader categorization of the different ways the word is used - in the categories lesbian love, lesbian woman, lesbian tendency, and Sappho - as well as through deeper textual analysis of the longer articles in the source material.

The results show a steady increase in the use of the word “lesbian” during the period, and also that the naming of female same-sex sexuality appears significantly earlier than what the previous research has shown; the earliest use in this source material is in 1842. In terms of content, “lesbian” was used mainly in negative contexts or connotations and the concept itself was often separated from people and instead used as connected to sexuality and the locations where sexuality and sexual acts take place. The way lesbianism was discussed during the earlier part of the period indicates that there were more discussions on female homosexuality than what the search could catch since the writers often used vague word choices and suggestive language instead of explicit terms like “lesbian”.

I uppsatsen undersöks de uppfattningar om ryska revolutionen, den efterföljande utvecklingen och Sovjetunionens grundande som kom till uttryck i den konsevativa idé- och debattorganet Svensk tidskrift under åren 1917-1926. Undersökningen har hämtat sin teoretiska utgångspunkt i den poskoloniala teorins område.

Tre övergripande teman kan sägas ha identifierats som särskilt betydelsefulla inom den konservativa diskussionen: föreställningen om det specifikt ryska i revolutionen, idén om den ryska historiens kontinuitet, samt föreställningen om Ryssland som ett historiskt, samtida och framtida hot. Dessa ingick i den konservativa uppfattningen om Ryssland som den främmande "diskursive Andre".

This thesis proposes two separate intents lying behind the use of violence: namely, “nationalizing” (Gumz 2001) or utopian ideology, and the strategic desire to control territory. Three hypotheses are formulated on this basis, and applied to the case of Lika in 1941. The first predicts that violence exercised by actors motivated by the first type of intent will become increasingly indiscriminate, and is strongly corroborated in the case of the Ustaše. The second hypothesis, building on Kalyvas’ (2006) model, predicts that the selective or indiscriminate nature of violence executed by actors motivated by the second type of intent will correlate with the actor’s level of control: this is largely corroborated in the case of the Italians, but only partly so in the case of the Partisans. The final hypothesis, combining the arguments of Kalyvas (2006) and Dulić and Hall (2014), predicts a stark contrast in the geographical spread of violence executed by strategic and ideological actors, and is strongly corroborated. The thesis works from a micro-level approach.

This essay has studied how politicians in Sweden argued in the debate regarding the issue of liqour smuggling in Sweden during the prohibition era.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the effects of New Public Management (NPM) reforms on three specific professional groups. From this investigation it is clear that the assumptions inherent in the NPM reforms have resulted in a clear breach of what we theoretically refer to as the professional contract between the state and the professions. We show in this analysis that our studied professional groups have lost central aspects of their professional autonomy. We problematize the perception that an ever-increasing demand for steering and control of professionals within the public sector should be perceived as something exclusively good. In addition to the costs of monitoring, the centrally important paradox of accountability should be taken into consideration, i.e. responsible interpretation and application of external accountability demands rest on the cultivation of the virtues that support good administrative judgement, the type of judgement that is threatened by the control-schemes presented in this article.

The essay is about the farmworkers that worked within a system of payment. This consisted in one part of a small amount of salary as payment in money and the other two was for food and a place to live. This type of payment made it problematic to see how much a worker actually earned. It was especially hard to compare with an industrial worker when the houses where run down and the food had a bad quality. Focus for this essay is what was discussed in the union’s weekly newspaper “Lantarbetaren” about the farmworkers between the years 1938-1942 when the debate was most intense, which it was in the last years, were the system of this type of payment was obsolete.

The essay is focused in three areas, the buildings that the workers lived in and its living condition, the work condition and the workers right to organize.

Folkhemmet eller i alla fall den den idealiserade bilden av folkhemmet har i Sverige haft och fortsätter ha en viss nostalgisk prägel över sig som en slags höjdpunkt av framtidshopp och samhällsbyggande och har kanske framförallt kommit att associeras med de s.k. rekordåren efter andra världskriget. Precis som 1950-talets USA, och Tysklands Wirtschaftwunder så är det en period som associeras med rekordartad tillväxt, låg arbetslöshet och utbyggnad av samhällsservicen.3 Folkhemmet har blivit själva symbolen för landet Sverige.Därför har den också tacksamt låtit sig lånas till olika versioner av historiebruk.

Socialdemokraterna (SAP) har förstås gärna använt sig av folkhemmet - detta gamla intyg på regeringsduglighet men ckså de Nya Moderaterna under Fredrik Reinfeldt och Per Schlingmann använde sig gärna av Socialdemokratiskt bildspråk från rekordåren, tog vissa nyckelbegrepp och omförhandlade betydelsen i dessa osv. I denna uppsats kommer vi dock att med hjälp av Ulf Zanders historiebrukstypologi undersöka Sverigedemokraterna och deras stundtals kontroversiella historiebruk av folkhemmet, detta kommer att sättas i relation till sverigedemokraternas historiska utvecklingskurva i strävan efter allt mer legitimitet och ideologisering.

A study of bias in Sweidsh historical textbooks based on a study of the portrayals of the battle of Stalingrad and D-day between 1950 and 2015

Throughout the course of the 19th century mankind experienced a lot of changes to the way they were used to live life, mostly due to the expansion of the industrial revolution. But the biggest change was perhaps the change in the conditions for women all over the world. Women no longer wanted to live their lives behind closed doors looking out from the window and thinking of all the things that they could have done with their lives. They wanted to be a part of society and they, sometimes literally, fought for change. In Sweden women got the right to vote in 1921. The way there was long and difficult with a lot of obstacles and prejudice to overcome. But not all of the associations had voting rights for women on their agenda. Some of them were strictly philanthropic. After reading Eva Österberg’s book “Rummet vidgas”, where she discusses her theory about 19th century women in Sweden and the “closed room” that used to be their arena of movement and its expansion during the 19th century, I decided to do a research in my hometown and therefor took a closer look at the first association started by women in 1854 in the little town of Eskilstuna, 90 km from Stockholm. The association was started by a few leading women and their goal was to help the less fortunate children of the community with clothes and shoes so they could attend school and later on be useful members of the society. In doing so the women themselves took their rightful place in the public society. The women were very successful, they achieved well more than they had set out for and the association managed to exist for over a hundred years helping thousands of children.

The article examines how people within the Church of Sweden's leadership tried to solve 'the problem of vagrancy' in Sweden in the early twentieth century. In focus are the priest John Melander and the deacon Josef Flinth, who advocated and realized various activities for categories of poor and mobile men in the population. These interventions, defined as help-to-self-help, differentiated between the 'worthy' and the 'unworthy' needy. In publications and lectures, Melander and Flinth presented arguments to transfer 'unworthy' categories to the 'worthy', thereby expanding the community of value. This expansion was conditioned, however, by boundaries drawn regarding ideas on belonging and ethnicity. Working in the borderlands of the community as part of a Christian calling, Melander and Flinth contributed to the expansion of social work in the early twentieth century.