This edited collection sheds light on Nordic families’ strategies and methods for transferring significant cultural heritage to the next generation over centuries. Contributors explore why certain values, attitudes, knowledge, and patterns were selected while others were left behind, and show how these decisions served and secured families’ well-being and values. Covering a time span ranging from the early modern era to the end of the twentieth century, the book combines the innovative "history from below" approach with a broad variety of families and new kinds of source material to open up new perspectives on the history of education and upbringing.

Lucas Haasis found a time capsule: A complete mercantile letter archive of the merchant Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens who lived in 18th century Hamburg. Luetkens travelled France between 1743-1745 in order to become a successful wholesale merchant. He succeeded in this undertaking via both shrewd business practice and proficient skills in the practice of letter writing. Based on this unique discovery, in this microhistorical study Lucas Haasis examines the crucial steps and activities of a mercantile establishment phase, the typical letter practices of Early Modern merchants, and the practical principles of persuasion leading to success in the 18th century.

This book focuses on the multiple and diverse masculinities ‘at work’. Spanning both historical approaches to the rise of ‘profession’ as a marker of masculinity, and critical approaches to the current structures of management, employment and workplace hierarchy, the book questions what role masculinity plays in cultural understandings, affective experiences and mediatised representations of a professional ‘career’.

The Development of Commercial Law in Sweden and Finland provides a broad perspective on North European commercial law in a comparative and international framework.

'At a historic moment, when religion shows all its social and political strength in various post-modern societies around our globe, this fascinating collection of studies from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century Europe demonstrates all the richness and innovative force of investigating individual and shared experiences when questioning the cultural, political and social place of religion in society. It also makes known in English the work of a series of Finnish historians elaborating together a pioneering vision of the notion of experience in the discipline of history.' - Piroska Nagy, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada This open access book offers a theoretical introduction to the history of experience on three conceptual levels: everyday experience, experience as process, and experience as structure. Chapters apply 'experience' to empirical case studies, exploring how people have made and shared their religion through experience in history. This book understands experience as a simultaneously socially constructed and intimately personal process that connects individuals to communities and past to future, thereby forming structures that create and direct societies. It represents the crossroads of a new field of the history of experience, and an established tradition of the history of lived religion. Chapters offer a longue duree view from the fourteenth-century heretics, via experiences of miracle, madness, sickness, suffering, prayer, conversion and death, to the religious artisanship of soldiers in the Second World War frontlines. It concentrates on Northern Europe, but includes materials from Italy, France and United Kingdom.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This timely book explores how Northern European countries have sought to balance their welfare states with increased levels of migration from low-income countries outside the EU. Using case studies of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, leading scholars analyse the varying approaches to this so-called ‘progressive dilemma’.