The society of spreading useful knowledge started to sell its magazine Reading for the People (RFP) in 1834. The idea with the society was to, through the magazine that contained useful knowledge, enlighten the Swedish peasantry. RFP contained articles about agricultural and economy for example.My goal with this essay is to investigate how the use of foreign articles in RFP changed over time. I?m also going to present a field and language categorization of the foreign articles and study the articles from Benjamin Franklin and Charles Dickens and investigate what kind of articles they wrote.

Tolfterna was a popular education organization that existed between 1896 and1964 and that arranged social evenings and set up a library for working women. This thesis purpose is to investigate Tolfternas's activities in 1902-1907 and hereby place Tolfterna in the education- and library history. The thesis examines the library catalog and the protocols from the social evenings and analyses them by means of the popular education ideologies of the early 1900's: Patriarchal education, civic education, self-education and the domestic/housewife ideal.The analysis shows that the organizers of Tolfterna as well as the working women who visited the social evenings had political and social interests. This places Tolfterna in a civic education context.The social evenings contained a mix of politically orientated discussions, traditional lectures and entertainment as music and reading. The library had self-education orientation, it contained mostly fiction and was run by the working women.

This master?s thesis analyzes how cultural policy was problematized in three governmental policy areas; culturalpolicy for the free sector, education policy and popular education policy, during the social democrat Ragnar Edenman?s time (1957-67) as minister of ecclesiasticalaffairs. Earlier research has examined the policy for the free sector, concerning artist?s economic problems. This thesisadds an analysis of the other fields of policy, which were reformed in the 1960?s by the same ministry.