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Biographical approaches to early modern history
This book contributes to the debates on the role and theory of biographical and life-writing research in historical research and methodology. The first part of the study analyses how biographical approaches have until now been used in research into the early modern history of Finland. It explores how the trends in biographical history have evolved from the eighteenth century to today. Church leaders and bishops were emphasised in a country that could boast of few statesmen. Early modern women’s biographies have been strongly influenced by fictional traditions. The second part presents four attempts at new ways of producing and presenting biographical histories that yield new kinds of information on early modern society. These chapters are influenced by the so-called new histories (which by now have become rather traditional social and cultural histories), microhistory, gender history, and the history of experience.
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This edited volume looks at the spread of settlements and the development of living conditions favorable to permanent peasant habitation in Finland during the pre-industrial period. The case to study in this volume is the relatively late settled northernmost part of Savo, now known as the Upper Savo (Ylä-Savo in Finnish) region, which was a border region between Sweden and Russia until the first half of the 17th century. The aim of the volume is to deepen conceptual and empirical knowledge of what kind of living conditions the late-populated frontier offered to settlers and their descendants from the beginning of settlement to the early industrialization. At the end of the 19th century Upper Savo was known as an example of misery, poverty and backwardness in Finland. This volume, however, shows that this perception of exceptional poverty and backwardness is not unambiguous, let alone self-imposed by the people living in the area. Despite its land resources, Upper Savo has been in a position to catch up with the core areas of settlement throughout its history, such as the later settled peripheries and border regions in general. In this work, we show that the development of the conditions for living in Upper Savo has been strongly path-dependent: the region can do nothing about its history and location.
The photographs of Ahti Rytkönen (1899–1989) are at the core of the rich artwork of this volume. Rytkönen’s black-and-white photographs of the northern Savo countryside with its inhabitants and slash-and-burn fields from the 1920s and 1930s are unique depictions of the life of Upper Savo rural society.
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Meaning, Doubt, Memories. Finns in Aidland 1965–2000
The book approaches the history of Finnish development cooperation through the experiences of development aid workers. At its core is a small group of Finns (experts and officials from different fields) who have worked with international development aid in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their memories and experiences, together with diverse archival material offer an interesting window into the world of development (cooperation), or “Aidland”, from the 1960s to the turn of the millennium.
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Church, clergy, and society in Finland, 1600–1800
It is generally recognized that in early modern society, the position of the church and clergy was very central. As many historians have stated over the decades, the church and state were closely connected and their power structures and ideologies supported each other. However, when studying the social and public role of the church and clergy, it soon becomes quite clear how pervasive this phenomenon was. The church not only created but also maintained and acted as a part of international, national, and local communities, structures, and cultures that connected people regardless of their social status and gender. The church was a spiritual, administrative, and social institution and experience environment, whose tasks, scope, and meanings changed and intertwined with the development, needs, and requirements of society. In this book, we investigate from different perspectives the motives and different means by which the church and clergy came to play a significant part in early modern society.
In this volume, the church is considered both as an administrative institution and as a social space and cultural structure. Hence, we do not focus on the history of theology or doctrinal questions. Instead, we consider the social and public roles and meanings of the church. The church as such is understood in this book as transnational, a strong national and local institution, and also a space and structure. The church had its own institutionalized place in society and its activities and rights were defined by law (Church law 1696, the Law of the Swedish kingdom 1734) and by the decrees given by the Royal Majesty. The church had its own archbishop-led administrative organization under the Royal Majesty and it worked in close cooperation with the Crown administration and county governors. In this volume, we understand the clergy as church servants, a trained and appointed professional group, a separate estate (social class), and also as a wide social network constructed by their families.
The approach of this book is social science history. In other words, the book examines the church and the clergy as an integral part of society and the individual communities who lived in the current Finnish territory during the early modern era. The topic is examined on the basis of three conceptual themes reflecting important new areas of research in the study of the social significance of the church and clergy: (1) the clergy and family as part of the community, (2) the church as a jointly built space, and (3) the church as an arena for interaction, knowledge, and politics. We approach this multidimensionality using different research questions, sources, methods, and theoretical approaches. The volume focuses on the 17th to 19th centuries, but many of the church and clergy-related phenomena are much older, and some of them extend to the present, so the articles also move beyond this time frame.
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Health History. Viewpoints and Approaches from the Middle Ages to the Present
This book deals with approaches, sources, and methods in health history from the middle ages to the twentieth century. Individual chapters demonstrate how historians of medicine and health choose their methodological approaches and form interpretations from primary sources. They discuss the practices of writing and show how obstacles in the research process can be overcome. Practical examples of source materials, used methods and research challenges give tools to students for carrying out projects independently and help them to understand different possibilities in the field of health history. In this book, history of health includes but is not limited to medical science. Emphasising medical pluralism, it places (public) health in a cultural and social field encompassing official and unofficial practitioners, medical institutions, and patients. Individual case studies highlight themes in Finnish, European, and African history.
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A Guide to Studying the History of Childhood: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Methods
This edited volume is a handbook of research methodologies for the history of childhood. The history of childhood is a vibrant, multidisciplinary field that incorporates a rich variety of methodological approaches developed in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, including archaeology, education, ethnology, literature, and history. The volume presents a collection of chapters that engage a range of different research traditions and employ different research material, conceptual tools, and methods of analysis for the historical study of childhood. In doing so, the volume attends to issues specific to the study of children and childhood, such as those related to research ethics and the theoretical complexities of defining ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’. While the central focus is on the history of childhood in Finland, the volume also includes international and transnational cases, contexts, and perspectives.
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The Muscovite. Sweden, Finland and Russia 1478–1721
The great change in European relations with Russia took place in 1478 when Muscovy replaced the trading Republic of Novgorod as a neighbor of Sweden, Livonia and Lithuania. Western Europe was since that year bordering to a bellicose great power with large resources causing dread. The feelings of dread caused by Russia with Czars like Ivan the Terrible became a standing theme in printed matter as well as politics and the image of Russia became very much similar to the image of Turkey, which threatened Europe from South-East. Various, usually rather negative, stereotype expressions characterized the vocabulary of the 16th century.
The Peace of Stolbova in 1617 started a period of successive change. The era of Sweden as a Great Power led to growing knowledge about Russia in almost every respect, but it was still based on the already accepted stereotypes. They started, however, typically to seem more diluted and thin with time. The image of Russia as a threat was to a growing extent replaced by an image of a possibility. The perhaps most remarkable but rather unoriginal printed Swedish description of Russia of the era was Regni Muschovotici Sciographia, published by Petrus Petrejus.
At the final stage of Sweden’s era as a great power there was a substantial widening but also polarization of the information on Russia. The Russian reform process during Tsar Peter I also began to influence the minds after the turn of the century in 1700. One of the principal describers of this process was Lars Johan Malm (Ehrenmalm), whose large manuscript about the power of the Russian Empire of that time, Några Anmärkningar Angående det Ryska Rijkets Nuvarande Macht from 1714, never reached the printers due to intervention from censors.
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The focus of this research is on Finland’s role in Soviet Union’s calculation of its foreign policy between 1920 and 1930. This was the first decade of both Finnish independence and of Soviet power in Russia. This book answers questions about the objectives of Soviet foreign policy in Finland, on the contacts used by the Soviet legation to obtain information, and on how well the Soviets understood Finland’s objectives.
People interested in Finland and in Russian perspectives with regards to foreign policy and neighbouring countries will find much new in this book because it relies on formerly unpublished Russian archival material to form the basis for charting Soviet objectives in Finland. The book shows that the Soviets primarily observed Finland in a larger regional context along with other states on its borders in the Baltic Sea region. The global objectives of the revolution and the Soviet Union, but also the domestic political situation in both countries, are reflected on this framework. The period was characterized by forced collectivization in the Soviet Union and, in Finland, by the rise of the right-wing Lapua Movement that emerged at the onset of the Great Depression, laying the foundations for the most severe crisis in the relations during 1929–1930 when the issues surrounding these events destabilized simultaneously the society and political decision-making in both countries.
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Health and healing have been central concerns throughout human history. Individuals and societies have devised multiple ways to health. Healing practices have often been linked to questions of knowledge, power, politics, and morals. The limits of acceptable healing have been contested by men and women, priests and doctors, elites and commoners, indigenous peoples and colonialists. Successful healers have sometimes been labeled as witches, quacks, or dangerous political agitators.
The contributions in this volume concentrate on healing in global history with case studies about Finland, southern Asia and Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and North America. They discuss medical pluralism and consider the arguments for and against individual healers and different healing systems. The authors focus on the popularity of medical systems, the appropriation and adoption of healing practices in cross-cultural contexts, and the prohibition of certain forms of healing.
Book Details"Channel Three will entertain you when television gets too seriousâ, the new entrant in Finlandâs broadcast television announced proudly at its launch in 1986. Channel Three was the first fully commercial television channel in the Nordic countries, founded and owned by a group of odd bedfellows: the public broadcaster YLE, its long standing commercial companion MTV and a growing electronics giant Nokia. The plans to start a commercial TV station were first severely opposed by leading politicians, but it was finally approved as a means to fight back international satellite channels and the efforts of major newspaper companies to enter the television market. Drawing from media policy studies and based on archive documents, contemporary media coverage and interviews of the main actors, the book provides a thorough analysis of the stages of Channel Three, indicating how it, despite its short lifespan, contributed profoundly to the commercialization and marketization of television in Finland.
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