Reframing Swedish–American relations by focusing on contacts, crossings, and convergences beyond migration 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. Contributors: Philip J. Anderson, North Park U; Jennifer Eastman Attebery, Idaho State U; Marie Bennedahl, Linnaeus U; Ulf Jonas Björk, Indiana U–Indianapolis; Thomas J. Brown, U of South Carolina; Margaret E. Farrar, John Carroll U; Charlotta Forss, Stockholm U; Gunlög Fur, Linnaeus U; Karen V. Hansen, Brandeis U; Angela Hoffman, Uppsala U; Adam Kaul, Augustana College; Maaret Koskinen, Stockholm U; Merja Kytö, Uppsala U; Svea Larson, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Franco Minganti, U of Bologna; Frida Rosenberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; Magnus Ullén, Stockholm U.

The histories of colonial settlement in America are generally presented as uniquely national stories. Yet because these histories involved settlers who crossed oceans, they are inherently transnational and have been important for different groups throughout the world. To understand how settlement histories are used to promote social, political, and commercial relations across national borders, Adam Hjorth n explores the little-known phenomenon of cross-border commemorations. Focusing on two celebrations of Swedish settlement in America -- the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary and the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial -- Hjorth n examines a wide variety of sources to demonstrate how cultural leaders, politicians, and businessmen used these events to promote international relations between the United States and Sweden during times of great geopolitical transformation. Cross-Border Commemorations argues that scholarship on public commemoration should expand beyond national borders and engage the shared and contested meanings of history across local, national, and transnational contexts.

“A beautifully written evocation of Ukraine's brutal past and its shaky efforts to construct a better future.”—Financial Times Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centuries, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia's wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918-1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe. In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine's tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin's famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine's struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.

Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America reinterprets Finnish experiences in North America by connecting them to the transnational processes of settler colonial conquest, far-settlement, elimination of natives, and capture of terrestrial spaces. Rather than merely exploring whether the idea of Finns as a different kind of immigrant is a myth, this book challenges it in many ways. It offers an analysis of the ways in which this myth manifests itself, why it has been upheld to this day, and most importantly how it contributes to settler colonialism in North America and beyond. The authors in this volume apply multidisciplinary perspectives in revealing the various levels of Finnish involvement in settler colonialism. In their chapters, authors seek to understand the experiences and representations of Finns in North American spatial projects, in territorial expansion and integration, and visions of power. They do so by analyzing how Finns reinvented their identities and acted as settlers, participated in the production of settler colonial narratives, as well as benefitted and took advantage of settler colonial structures. Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America aims to challenge traditional histories of Finnish migration, in which Finns have typically been viewed almost in isolation from the broader American context, not to mention colonialism. The book examines the diversity of roles, experiences, and narrations of and by Finns in the histories of North America by employing the settler colonial analytical framework.

Border security has been high on public-policy agendas in Europe and North America since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City and on the headquarters of the American military in Washington DC. Governments are now confronted with managing secure borders, a policy objective that in this era of increased free trade and globalization must compete with intense cross-border flows of people and goods. Border-security policies must enable security personnel to identify, or filter out, dangerous individuals and substances from among the millions of travelers and tons of goods that cross borders daily, particularly in large cross-border urban regions. This book addresses this gap between security needs and an understanding of borders and borderlands. Specifically, the chapters in this volume ask policy-makers to recognize that two fundamental elements define borders and borderlands: first, human activities (the agency and agent power of individual ties and forces spanning a border), and second, the broader social processes that frame individual action, such as market forces, government activities (law, regulations, and policies), and the regional culture and politics of a borderland. Borders emerge as the historically and geographically variable expression of human ties exercised within social structures of varying force and influence, and it is the interplay and interdependence between people's incentives to act and the surrounding structures (i.e. constructed social processes that contain and constrain individual action) that determine the effectiveness of border security policies. This book argues that the nature of borders is to be porous, which is a problem for security policy makers. It shows that when for economic, cultural, or political reasons human activities increase across a border and borderland, governments need to increase cooperation and collaboration with regard to security policies, if only to avoid implementing mismatched security policies.

With comparative frontier history and pioneering use of indigenous sources, Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest. He focuses on the Tai domains of the Yunnan frontier on the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.