The reign of King Eric III (1389–1442) was marred by conflicts between peasant communities and royal officials in both mainland Norway and the Norse overseas provinces. Scholars have traditionally explained popular unrest in the 1420s and 1430s as a direct reaction to the crown’s employment of foreign administrators. Two of the earliest and best-documented examples stem from the Eastern Norwegian community of Rakkestad (Østfold) and the island community of Orkney in 1424/25. The targets in both cases – Herman Molteke in Rakkestad and David Menzies in Orkney – had foreign origins, and historians have often treated peasants’ aversion to them as evidence for anti-foreign sentiment in the Norwegian realm in the late Middle Ages. However, sources from only one of the two cases – Orkney – include explicit grievances concerning foreigners in office. In this article, the author seeks to explain the discrepancy through a comparison of complaints, antagonists and activists in the two cases. It is argued that Orkney, an autonomous province with its own representative body, had sufficient agency to submit new immigration regulation proposals in direct negotiations with the crown. By contrast, Rakkestad was subject to the intermediary authority of the Norwegian council, which represented the interests of Norway’s peasantry and used complaints as a premise for new regulatory policies in later decades.

For a brief period of the interwar years, leading figures from the Norwegian Labour Party went on ‘pilgrimage’ to Red Vienna, the Austrian capital under Social Democratic rule. Once in Vienna, the Austrian Social Democratic party organization, the paramilitary Republikanischer Schutzbund, culture and schooling programs, welfare projects and large-scale housing complexes all impressed the Norwegian visitors. Personal impressions and concrete ideas on a wide range of fields, from organizational principles to pedagogy and symbolism, were enthusiastically recounted to party comrades in Norway. In this article, an overview is given of this representation of Austrian Social Democracy in the Labour party public, especially focusing on political fields where we can prove or reasonably assume that Austro-Marxist influence had an impact on the political activities of the party. The article concludes that this influence was comprehensive and had a protracted impact on the party, and argues that this contributed to the ideological rehabilitation of Social Democracy on the Norwegian Labour Party’s left wing.

The article takes its starting point in the geographer Gabriel Øidne’s mapping of cultural patterns in Southern Norway from about 1880 to the 1950s (Øidne 1957). In territorial terms the field is limited to the southern and western coastal strip, where the pious lay movement can be said to have had a cultural hegemony. The aim is to focus on causes – not to postulate a definite answer, but to clarify the kind of explanations that have been discussed, and to point at perspectives that until now have received little attention. The main question is: Why did people in these areas embrace revivalism in such massive numbers? The article suggests that new understanding may be worked out by considering socio-economic conditions in combination with aspects from the history of mentality and network theories. Above all, however, the influence from overseas contacts and transnational transfer is emphasized.

This article presents a historical analysis of coercive measures in Norwegian psychiatric assessments and institutional practice in the period c. 1900–1950. As source material the study uses the professional debate on institutional treatment and coercion as it was presented in textbooks on psychiatric care and in scientific publications. It also uses the archives from Reitgjerdet asylum to exemplify institutional practice after 1923. Reitgjerdet was a national institution for criminal and especially difficult male patients. As such, conditions at Reitgjerdet differed from the regular asylums in Norway, but at the same time its practices were influenced by the same trends as the rest of the psychiatric institutional sector.

The main argument is that Norway’s psychiatric profession at the beginning of the 20^th century understood modern psychiatry to be closely connected to the Enlightenment’s new ideals of humane treatment, and especially the subsequent rejection of mechanical restraints found in the ‘no restraint’ movement. Seclusion and chemical restraints were considered the humane alternative. This changed during the period, and by the 1940s mechanical restraints had become preferential. The article discusses the causes underlying these changes.