Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Nordic Countries

Parliamentary democracy is the most common regime type in the contemporary political world, but the quality of governance depends on effective parliamentary oversight and strong political parties. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have traditionally been strongholds of parliamentary democracy. In recent years, however, critics have suggested that new challenges such as weakened popular attachment, the advent of cartel parties, the judicialization of politics, and European integration have threatened the institutions of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic region.

This...

Unlike writers of retrospective Holocaust memoirs, Nansen recorded the mundane and horrific details of camp life as they happened, "from day to day." With an unsparing eye, Nansen described the casual brutality and...

Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945 examines the evolution of the Lutheran state Church of Norway in response to the German occupation. While German Protestant churches generally accepted Nazism and state incorporation, Norway's churches rejected both Nazism and ideological alignment. Arne Hassing moves through the history of the Church of Norway's relationship to the Nazi state, from its initial confused complicities to its open resistance and separation. He writes engagingly of the people at the center of this struggle and reflects on how the resistance affected the...

This study is the result of a long standing interest by the author in the expression of social identities of the past, perhaps more specifically, social identities as translated through gender, and their resulting cultural expressions and material remains. The overarching subject explored is the gender structures prevalent in the Late Iron Age in the county of Vestfold, Norway. The Scandinavian Late Iron Age, popularly known as the Viking Age, is often represented as deeply and inherently male, with male aggressiveness as the ideal presented to the public, leaving little room for...

This book investigates the practical and ritual dimensions of trees and timber in the Bronze Age and Iron Age of Scandinavia. The arguments are developed through the study of a broad range of materials including rock-art images depicting trees, charcoal from archaeological contexts identified to species, and prehistoric long-houses. The archaeological remains are related to a wider discussion in anthropology and historical ecology concerning the multifaceted relationship between humans and trees.

The Vikings provides a concise but comprehensive introduction to the complex world of the early medieval Scandinavians. In the space of less than 300 years from the late eighth to the late eleventh centuries CE, people from what are now Norway, Sweden and Denmark left their homelands in unprecedented numbers to travel across the then-known world. Over the last half-century archaeology and its related disciplines have radically altered our understanding of this period, and beyond the stereotypical Viking raider we can now perceive a cosmopolitan mix of traders and warriors,...