This essay reviews Swedish schoolbooks for their content on topics related to the concept of “racial biology” that at the one hand is associated with the description of the human races, at the other with eugenics. Books on geography from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century give the human races much attention. Dark-skinned races are generally depicted as mentally inferior to the white race, but the Polynesians are treated with high esteem. One author in the 1930’s and 1940’s is strongly influenced by the writings of H. F. K. Günther, who was a prominent racial theorist in Nazi Germany. Even the opinion that the Nordic race constitutes a “master race” is advocated in these schoolbooks, but in 1945 the most extreme aspects of the teaching are removed. In the 1950’s the interest in race in geography books declines. Biology books from the 1950’s onward explicitly dismiss claims as to the inferiority of certain races or the danger of racial admixture. Eugenics, however, is advocated in biology books from 1928 well into the 1970’s. The Swedish sterilization policy (1934–1975) is in many books described in considerable detail and defended (contrary to the conception that the issue was not publicly discussed from the 1950’s onwards). In the 1980’s the interest in eugenics has declined and it is not a topic when modern in utero diagnostics are dealt with.
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Kim, D. Y.;
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Roberts, David Lindsay;
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Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800--2000
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Prat, Daniel;
Raynal-Roques, Aline;
Roguenant, Albert;
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