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AbstractThere is a widespread notion that archives, especially national archival institutions, represent the nation’s memory. Historically, archives have played an important role for history writing, thereby contributing to the construction of national master narratives and the strengthening of national identities. What the association between archives and memory actually means is however debated in archival literature. Taking the discussion on the relation between archives and memory as a starting point, this study examines how national archives in today’s world present themselves to the public. The source material consists of mission statements collected from 138 webpages and 18 Facebook accounts all over the world. The first research question concerns the connection between mission statements and a national master narrative, the second asks where references to national memory and national identity are most pronounced, and the third asks whether self-images of national archives can be connected to historical experiences. The analysis shows that mission statements contain many allusions to history and heritage, while references to memory and identity are less widespread than expected. Some variations between continents, and between different groups of countries are identified, although relatively small. A possible explanation is that national archives are engaged in quite a lot of international cooperation, for instance in the International Council on Archives and UNESCO. Thus, they are likely to be as much influenced by each other as by the political environment in their own countries.

In recent decades historians of science have argued that observation became something of a way of life in the early modern period. This article expands this analysis by shifting focus from observational practices within natural and experimental philosophy to a number of discourses and practices of self-examination and self-observation in eighteenth-century Germany. While the initial aim of these was therapeutic rather than scientific, therapeutic connotations were partly replaced by epistemic virtues and techniques adopted from natural and experimental philosophy toward the end of the century. The article further argues that the subordination of self-observation to scientific modes of procedure reflected the increasingly radical interest in human subjectivity and, by extension, the emergence of a modern civic and individual self. 

Hardgrounds represent synsedimentary cemented stratigraphic beds that form at or near the seafloor. Borings represent a key line of evidence for investigations of hardground development and record the evolution of bioerosion and boring organisms. The unequivocal identification of borings is done through identification of the crosscutting relationship between the proposed boring and a hard substrate, such as lithoclasts and/or shells, with morphological criteria able to be used when dealing with a homogeneous substrate, such as micritic hardgrounds. Bioeroded hardgrounds and burrows with a micrite halo/lining are subject to fracturing and reworking, resulting in accumulations of intraclasts in flat-pebble conglomerates (FPC). The recognition of borings and broken burrows with a halo can be challenging in FPC. Using trace fossils preserved in situ and in FPC from late Cambrian carbonates of North China, we establish a set of criteria for distinguishing borings from burrows with a halo in FPC. Features such as the relative volume of burrows and borings versus the host pebble and the number of traces per pebble, the cross-cutting relationship with different colored laminae, and the presence of pyrite or glauconite encrustations can all be invoked to aid recognition of borings. Examination of the cross-cutting relationship and encrustation of trace fossils are not sufficient on their own. Our results suggest caution is necessary in defining borings in FPC, particularly as synsedimentary deformation of burrows with a halo in late Cambrian FPC can create structures that resemble borings.

This thesis analyses the texts and audio-files of the exhibitions of the Dutch memorial museums about the Second World War to understand how perpetrators have been represented. In a social constructionist approach on cultural memory and heritage it can be argued that memorial museums are institutions which partake in the processes of cultural memory and heritage during which a reconstruction of the past is developed which can be connected to the values of the current society. Cultural memory and heritage provide a shared past for the community and a connection between the past, present, and future. The aim is to find out who is represented, how they are represented, and how their narrative relates to Dutch memory culture. This has been done through an analysis of the texts of the exhibition using Fairclough’s three dimensional model for Critical Discourse Analysis.It can be concluded that the narrative of the perpetrators in the Netherlands has hardly changed since the exhibitions still represent the stereotypical German, high-ranking, and/or violent perpetrators. However, the exhibitions do focus on local perpetrators rather than the elite in Germany, they include women as perpetrators, and present the perpetrators as ordinary people who became perpetrators due to a variety of social, cultural, and mental factors. Additionally, the exhibitions indicate that individuals, including perpetrators, cannot be either ‘good’ or ‘evil’ but should be analysed individually to understand the positive and negative consequences of their choices and actions. Nonetheless, more Dutch perpetrators, lower-ranking individuals, and guards who tried to help the prisoners need to be represented to provide a more complete image of the perpetrators and to represent a more nuanced narrative where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Additionally, the variety of reasons that turned regular people into perpetrators could be better explored through a more diverse group of perpetrators. Finally, within the context of moral consciousness, active citizenship, and reflection, the portrayal of the different choices made by the different perpetrators and the effect these had would be valuable cases of reflection for the visitor.

Engaging with scholarship on hegemony, park history, and in particular with Sevilla-Buitrago’s analysis of Central Park as a pedagogical space, this article traces the establishment of two parks in the Swedish textile industry centre of Norrköping. These parks, bearing very similar names – Folkparken and Folkets Park – were established just six years apart. But though both parks linked “park” and “people” ( Folk), their intended political effects were radically different. The 1895 Folkparken was an elite attempt to create a de-politicised landscape park, while the 1901 Folkets Park was instead the labour movement’s attempt to create their own space. Exploring this latter park enables telling a story of park production beyond elite dominance. Like dozens of similar labour-controlled parks across Sweden, the People’s Park allowed Norrköping’s labour movement to shape their landscape long before the Social Democrats made any significant inroads into parliamentary politics. Combining a platform for socialistic agitation, with a theatre and space for recreation, this park quickly became central to Norrköping’s working class. Thereby, it could both enable social-democratic presence at an everyday level, and function as an important resource during periods of intense class-struggle.

This article investigates the modern history of genealogy through the lens of keyword indexes – an essential resource for access to genealogical information. Empirically, the article studies the role of indexes in Euro-American genealogy from the nineteenth century to today. Particular attention is paid to the 1960s–2010s, when genealogy changed through growing popular engagement, new technologies, rising and falling academic interest, and increased commercialisation. Focusing on a set of grassroots cases from Sweden that have been crucial to the subfield of Swedish-American genealogy, the article explores the work of local Swedish heritage societies and the dream of empirical ‘totality’; the cooperation between heritage societies and academic historians; the impact of microfilm and digital technologies in creating a sense of information overload; the economy of unpaid volunteer and state-subsidised labour; and how paper-based indexes, created largely through grassroots initiatives, have been transformed into digital commodities on an international genealogical market. While this is an important enquiry for understanding the history of genealogy – one of the most widespread popular pursuits in modern history – it also addresses the intricate relations between grassroots initiatives, academic research, and capitalism in modern archive history.

Human-environment dynamics in past societies has been a major field of research in the Mediterranean for a long time, but has grown significantly following the increase in the number and quality of palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental records in the last two decades. Here we sketch the outline of this field of research based on 1,531 author keywords from 280 peer-reviewed articles published in 78 different scientific journals during 2016–2021. Sourced from the Web of Science, the selected studies cover the time span from the Neolithic to the Roman period across the Mediterranean and provide a large number of entry points for the interested reader regardless of their prior knowledge and specific interests. The results make evident the breadth and interdisciplinary nature of this research and show that it is possible to approach questions of human-environment dynamics in many and diverse ways. Among other things, our overview outlines the importance of temporal and spatial scales, as well as the elusive nature of causality, and highlights that monocausal models connecting climate events and societal collapse are increasingly replaced by scenarios favouring more nuanced renditions of the sequence of events within which internal societal factors are given more room for play.

Export taxation holds a particular place within trade policy, especially so during the mercantilist era. While governments tried to ensure consistent export surpluses, they would at the same time put tariffs on those goods, possibly impeding export growth. This article quantifies export duties in Denmark and Sweden during close to a century, to analyze which intensity they had over time and which role they played within trade policy. The article finds that these taxes were at times rather high, particularly on raw materials partly reserved for domestic use or refinement. The fiscal dimension of export taxation clearly played an important role as well, as revenue needs often delayed the removal of tariffs. One conclusion is that the regulation of exports presents an interesting case of political conflict, between promoting growth and filling state coffers.

Organizing rural workers has always proved to be a challenge for the labour movement. This was especially the case in Scandinavia where well into the industrial era, labour and property relations in the agricultural countryside remained essentially feudal in character. Nonetheless, and especially in the rich agricultural districts of the southernmost province of Skåne, the Swedish labour movement had succeeded spectacularly by the interwar years. Perhaps unintuitively, a key to its success was that it focused as much money and energy on constructing new spaces of culture and leisure – so-called People's Houses and People's Parks – as it did to direct workplace organizing. Drawing on Kevin Cox's concepts of “spaces of dependence” and “spaces of engagement,” this paper explains how and why Sweden's labour unions succeeded in remaking Skåne's political geography and transformed the region into one of the strongest social-democratic districts in early-twentieth century Sweden.

Five decades after the United Nation's first conference on the environment in 1972, the IPCC warned that ‘any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all’. Faced with steeply rising greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating biodiversity loss and continued degradation of oceans, forests and soil, the situation appears increasingly baffling. Why do we not see effective measures to turn these developments around? As the situation grows dire, it becomes more mysterious: what exactly is this crisis and why has it proven so difficult to solve? If the problem persists, is it because it is not properly understood? Yet, the environmental question has been studied for decades and diagnoses are legion: capitalism, colonialism, overpopulation, economic growth, humanity's inherent short-sightedness, patriarchy, the private property system – or the tragedy of the commons, the disconnect from nature in Western culture, corporate anti-environmental campaigns, the Neolithic adoption of agriculture – or its more recent industrialisation, the miscommunication of environmentalists and scientists, Christianity and neoliberalism have all been proposed as fundamental causes of the crisis. Despite this long and rich history of debate, it may be, as Pierre Charbonnier argues, that we need a more precise understanding of the ‘ecological question’ to find a way out of the present impasse. In line with Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith's argument, we are convinced that such rethinking of the environmental must be historical, but also that it must pay special attention to economic aspects. Since the end of the Second World War, economics has risen to prominence as a form of expertise in governance at the expense of other kinds of knowledge, and the environment has become closely intertwined with the economic in the ways it has been governed. In that light, it is not surprising that current discussions among scholars, climate scientists, politicians and social movements hold that the environmental crisis calls for a reevaluation of the economic. History is central to this endeavour and can be ‘usable’ in the current crisis, as it, in Deborah Coen's words, can ‘reveal the contingent and often contradictory traces of the past in the present – and to provide clarity for the future’. In this introduction we discuss three partially overlapping ways in which historical perspectives can be helpful to the effort of constructing an ecologically stable society. In contrast to the general tendency in the twenty-first century academy to divide into ever more specialised fields, we call for a broader conversation among historians of the economic and of the environmental to reveal the paths that brought us here – and the ones not taken. We need new histories of thought, institutions, movements and governance that combine the economic and the environmental to reach a better understanding of the present crisis, decode the specific mechanisms of inaction in the face of looming catastrophe, and strive towards more apt formulations of the environmental. We wish to contribute to an emerging conversation located at the intersection of history of economic thought, intellectual history and political history more generally by pointing to strands of research that could be drawn together and that this special issue is meant to engage in dialogue.