Article ID: CBB243740849

Race, Racial Biology and Eugenics in Swedish School-books from the 19th and 20th centuries (2008)

unapi

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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Authors & Contributors
Hyun, Jaehwan
Tornquist, Leif Christian
Sánchez D. Sánchez
César Leyton
Morning, Ann
Ideland, Malin
Concepts
Race
Eugenics
Biology
Textbooks
Evolution
Education
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
Sweden
Germany
Americas
Japan
Greece
Institutions
National Research Council (U.S.)
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
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