Under de senaste decennierna har intresset för rumslighet märkts tydligt inom en rad humanvetenskapliga discipliner. Rum och plats har setts som något som kan studeras både i sin egen rätt och sammanvävt med de processer varigenom de observeras och konstrueras.

I denna antologi är den övergripande ambitionen att föra diskussionen vidare och att fördjupa kunskapen om relationen mellan idéer, kulturellt meningsskapande och rumslighet inom historievetenskaperna.

Bokens kapitel skildrar olika fall men förenas av den historiemetodologiska övertygelsen att rumslighet som teoretisk och begreppslig utgångspunkt bäst låter sig studeras i relation till faktiska historiska exempel. Fallen rör sig från det sena 1800-talet till vår samtid: från det (o)ljud som 1800-talets positivhalare spred på Stockholms gator till hur Guggenheimmuseet 2019 gjordes till en plats för politiskt motstånd, och från konstruktionen av kirurgiska rum vid sekelskiftet 1900 till ergonomin i kalla krigets svenska stridsflygplan.

The corset La Gracieuse was advertised for the first time in August 14, 1880, by the well renowned fashion retailer Henric Labatt in Stockholm. The product was a novelty in Swedish marketing: the first branded corset, one of first branded mass-consumer goods in Sweden, and the first corset in Sweden being marketed through the use of an image. The purpose of this article is to explore the somewhat dubious success of La Gracieuse. The first section analyzes the new marketing methods used by Henric Labatt, as well as the catching up by competitors and the waning of the brand, more than 15 years after the first ad, both as a marketed product and as a fashionable corset. The second part analyzes the ambiguous success of La Gracieuse. While we know nothing of sales and quantities, we do have a large trail of satirical, moralist and misogynist texts written by men, using La Gracieuse (and no other brand) as a target for fashion criticism. It is possible that this fierce criticism of La Gracieuse as a symbol of the immorality and harmfulness of modernity made the corset more widely known. 

Hair fashion developed fast in Sweden at the turn of the eighteenth century. Wigs were put aside, and a fashionable appearance was based on the use of natural hair. The new hair fashion was cheaper, less demanding and more accessible. This chapter uses advertisements in the Stockholm press to analyse this shift in relation to the concept of consumer culture and discusses choice as a basic criterium for shopping. The changes in hair fashion coincide with major shifts in dress at the end of the eighteenth century. Like these changes towards a less-complicated, cotton-based fashion, the development of hairstyles made possible a growing market for hair care products. Hair fashion based on wigs rested on expensive and exclusive know-how within a closed guild, while the use of natural hair rested on less-costly products, such as extensions and pomades, which were easier to produce and cheaper to buy per unit. This opened a local market for hair products in Stockholm, which included possibilities for consumers to make a range of choices between different alternatives and competing products—a prerequisite for the existence of shopping.

From the late nineteenth century, coffee substitutes with alleged health-promoting effects were a frequently advertised commodity in the Swedish press. This chapter argues that competing manufacturers used a range of arguments to establish the conception that health was a choice made by conscious and rational middle-class individuals and illness, thus, was the consequence of not choosing reconciling arguments of everyday economic rationality, science, motherhood and civic duty in regard to the national economy. Advertisements targeted women, as keepers of the household economy, as major coffee consumers and as mothers of supposedly coffee-drinking children. Not choosing Swedish coffee substitutes was seen to hurt the economic independence of Sweden and created unnecessary nervous disorders and weak citizens. Physicians and politicians raised their voices against what they perceived as an increased abuse of coffee to such a level that it was politicised the years before the First World War. Nonetheless, despite these efforts, it is hard to see the success of substitutes. No matter how cheap and healthy they claimed their products to be, manufacturers of coffee substitutes were unable to convince Swedes to abandon real coffee.

The article discusses the female beauty ideal of the small foot in the Swedish press during the second half of the nineteenth century, as an object for the male gaze in fiction, as an actual fashion ideal, and as a prescribed beauty practice for women. It consists of three parts, analysing different subgenres within the press. First, I show how a male notion of the beauty and erotic attractiveness of the small foot was constructed in short stories and serial novels published in the daily and weekly press. Next, I show how this ideal was visually represented for its realization in every-day life in figures in fashion journals. Both genres presented an ideal unattainable for most women. Third, I discuss articles in dailies and weeklies giving advice on how to take care of feet, warning against ambitions to make the foot look small. Taken together, representations of female feet in the Swedish press involved a construction of the foot that also constructed women as perpetually failing in relation to the existing beauty ideal, making it part of a discursive misogynist practice, according to which women was supposed to invest in their appearance, and were derided and ridiculed when they did.

The Swedish bicameral parliament data presents a valuable textual resource that is of interest for many researches and scholars.The parliamentary texts offer many avenues for research including the study of how various affairs were run by governments over time.The Parliament proceedings are available in textual format, but in their original form, they are noisy and unstructured and thus hard to explore and investigate.In this paper, we report the transformation of the raw bicameral parliament data (1867-1970) into a structured lexical resource annotated with various word and document level attributes.The annotated data is then made searchable through two modern corpus infrastructure components which provide a wide array of corpus exploration, visualization, and comparison options.To demonstrate the practical utility of this resource, we present a case study examining the transformation of the concept of'market' over time from a tangible physical entity to an abstract idea. 

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive examination of the early cannabisbasedfood products industry, using Sweden as a case study. Drawing upon historical newspaper articles andadvertisements from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, the authors trace the short-lived development ofthe industry, from the initial exploitation of fears of tuberculosis in the late 19th century, followed by the “boom”in hempseed extract products and the widening of its claimed effects and, finally, increased skepticism and critiques of such products across the popular press in the early 20th century.

Design/methodology/approach – A rigorous search of the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive wasconducted to gather newspaper articles and advertisements on cannabis-based foods. The collected resourceswere scrutinized using critical discourse analysis to tease out key discourses at work, particularly around theconcepts of health, nutrition and science.

Findings – The authors find that central to the marketization of cannabis-based foods was the construction ofdisease based on scientific and medical discourse, fearmongering to create a strong consumer base and individualization to place responsibility on consumers to take action to protect their family’s health. This demonstrates not only the long historical relationship between science and food marketing but also how brands’ health claims could often be fraudulent or overstated.

Originality/value – It is important to cast a historical lens on the commercialization of cannabis-basedfood products because demand for similar types of products has rapidly grown over the past decade. Now, just as before, manufacturers tap into consumers’ insecurities about health, and many of the same questions continue to be mooted about products’ safety. Paying greater attention to the broader and problematic history of commercial cannabis can, thus, serve as a reminder for both consumers and policymakers to think twice about whether hemp really is for health and if the claims it espouses are a mirage rather than a miracle.