On Friday, September 27, I awoke at 3:45 am in order to catch the 5:05 train from Gothenburg to Stockholm.  I was making the trip to Sweden's capital city for the Swedish Fulbright Commission's orientation for this year's grantees.  The day began with coffee and pastries, and an opportunity to meet the amazing group of scholars and graduate students undertaking projects across the country.

The morning session took place at the Swedish Film Institute with an overview of the Fulbright program and its history, and with two classic Swedish tourist films--one from the 1930s, and the other from the 1960s. If you want to see how Swedes tried to draw American tourists to the country at the height of the Great Depression, check out the film Queen of the Baltic (that has been lovingly restored and preserved by the Swedish Film Institute). 

The day also included a visit to the Nordiska Museum, a museum of Swedish cultural history founded by Artur Hazelius. Hazelius worried that industrialization would destroy Sweden's unique culture heritage, and so he created the Nordiska Museum as a way to preserve the nation's folkways before they disappeared. He also created Skansen in 1891, the world's first outdoor living history museum where he sought to bring together wild and domesticated animals, traditional buildings, and people practicing traditional handicrafts in a single place. The result is sometimes called a miniature Sweden.

Riding the giant Dalahäst at Skansen

At the Nordiska Museum, curator Maria Perers gave a very interesting history of the transformation of Swedish domestic life. Focusing on furniture and urban spaces, she showed the progression from crowded single-room apartments to the more modern ideal of modern, multi-room apartments decorated with Swedish modern furniture. She noted how the Swedish government responded to the housing shortages of the 1960s with the Miljonprogrammet that sought to create one million new dwellings between 1965 and 1974. The sudden appearance of so much new housing created an opportunity for a Swedish furniture company that could mass produce affordable, ready-to-assemble home furnishing--and thus the rise of IKEA--currently the world's largest furniture manufacturer.

As a historian, the high point of the day was a guided tour of the Vasa Museum by the museum's Director of Research, Dr. Fred Hocker. The Vasa was a Swedish warship commissioned by King Gustav II Adolph who wanted his navy to have the world's most powerful warship. For three years, shipbuilders and artisans crafted the massive, ornate ship and its massive 64 bronze guns. However, design flaws left the ship badly unstable, and on its maiden voyage a gust of wind caught the ship when it was only 1300 meters from the dock. The ship lurched to the side, water flooded in its open gunports, and it quickly sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

Almost perfectly preserved by the cold water and mud of Stockholm harbor, the ship was raised in 1961 and presented in an amazing six-story museum that allows visitors to view the outside of the craft from top to bottom. The museum and its presentation of the warship is simply breathtaking, a museum perfectly suited to helping visitors to appreciate and admire this remarkable piece of material culture. The museum at once celebrates the height of Swedish military glory in the seventeenth century, the hubris of King Gustav Adolph, and the ingenuity of the Swedes to transform one of the most embarrassing disasters in Swedish history into Scandinavia's most popular museum.

The day ended with a very warm reception by the Counselor for Public Diplomacy of the United States Embassy in Sweden.  Not only did I get to meet several members of the Embassy and some former Fulbrighters, but I also met some of the Swedes who will be going to the United States next year as Fulbright grantees. It was really interesting talking to them about their thoughts on the United States.  I particularly enjoyed talking with one young man who loves downloading NPR shows--including Backstory with the American History guys! 

A great, very long day. In retrospect, it seemed quite fitting that my orientation to the Swedish Fulbright program should be so deeply devoted to highlighting Sweden's unique contributions to public history.