Many documentation initiatives and collections of testimonies were initiated in the immediate postwar period. This article delves into one such initiative. It focuses on the practice of early recounting and active listening at boarding school for young Holocaust survivors in Sweden. The article explores, by a close reading of an article authored by one of the teachers and eight full-length essays from the students, both the teacher's perspectives on the young survivors' need for certain education and emotional assistance and the survivors' early reflections on the experiences of recounting, education, survival and life the first years after the Holocaust.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Sweden saw an upsurge in state-sponsored memory projects pertaining to the country’s controversial and largely unspoken relationship with the Holocaust. However, the collections that were created in the 1990s, containing hundreds of ego-documents—interviews, letters and pictures—have not been made accessible to the public. Instead, they are hidden away, protected by institutions who deem the archival subjects too vulnerable for public exposure. In these cases, “vulnerability” is often used as the main argument for why Holocaust collections should not be digitized. In this presentation I will discuss the current gap that exists between cultural heritage practice and government policy on digitization, accessibility, and research ethics. By discussing Swedish examples of Holocaust collections that have or have not been digitized, I attempt to demonstrate how discourses about vulnerability affect the use and non-use of archived life stories from survivors of the Holocaust in public history settings in Sweden.

The topic of climate change is neither settled nor one-sided. To those who accept it, the best scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests that anthropogenic climate change is real. But there are many who reject that evidence and dismiss any claim about ongoing climate change as not only untrue, but as a great evil.  In the mounting scholarly and popular calls to understand the “religious dimensions” of climate change, it’s nearly axiomatic that religion “has a part to play” in shaping responses to climate change. But as in other areas, there’s often an apologetic suggestion that hegemonic patterns – e.g., acceptance of anthropogenic climate change and commitment to counter it – are self-evidently tied to “traditional” religious values, while opposition to such patterns or denial of climate change is “cultural,” “political,” or otherwise somehow not really religious. That is, the (explicit or implicit) focus of much of this writing is more on what the public responses from groups and leaders some of us call religious ought to be than what they are.

Whatever the science might say, the social importance of anthropogenic climate change isn’t determined by its observable effects but by political contestation. Or, as Colin Hay has noted, “crises are constituted in and through narrative.” Different climate change narratives can serve different socially formative interests. Starting from this constructivist position, this paper discusses evangelical Protestant examples from Chick Publications, RaptureReady.com, and Resisting the Green Dragon, showing how contemporary climate change discourse itself is positioned as a Satanic or anti-Christian crisis, narrated as part of a battle between good and evil, and is ultimately part of larger, long-term concerns about evangelical power and social reproduction. Having raised some problems with assuming that climate change can be understood as a universal truth and that it is, in and of itself, self-evidently a crisis, the paper concludes with a discussion about ways of framing what is primed to be a long-running scholarly engagement with “religion and climate change,” arguing that before we ask what so-called religious actors’ responses to climate change are, we should first understand how they respond to the claim that climate change is happening and is a crisis to begin with.

Jewish life in Sweden went on much as usual during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Swedish Jews were not rounded up and massacred or sent to death camps. In the aftermath, there were no mass graves, no decimated communities, no surviving remnant to locate. Nonetheless, the destruction of European Jewry became embedded in Swedish soil in the immediate aftermath and several monuments to the Nazis’ Jewish victims were erected in the decade following the end of the Second World War.This paper builds on our respective and collaborative research on Swedish cemeteries where victims of Nazi persecution are buried, highlighting how the victims and their graves were identified and memorialized in the first ten years after the Holocaust. Our research provides a novel perspective since most existing studies focus on how nations, communities, organizations, and individuals commemorated their own victims. Sweden could make no such claims to Jewish losses, and so the context offers new insight into how Jewish life and death at the hands of the Nazis were memorialized by Jewish diaspora communities in the aftermath. Our findings indicate that the geographies and politics of memory were evident in how the Swedish Jewish diaspora, which suffered no victimization due to Sweden’s non-belligerent status during the Second World War, commemorated Jewish victims of many nationalities who happened to die in Sweden in the immediate aftermath.In the spring and summer of 1945, approximately 30,000 surviving victims of the Nazis, including around 10,000 Jews, were transported to Sweden for medical care and recovery. Referred to as “The Rescued of 1945” (“1945 års räddade”), many did not long survive that rescue, dying en route or soon after arrival. With no connections to and in the host country, the victims were buried in Sweden’s cemeteries. The first commemorations of the Jewish victims were the small, flat gravestones commissioned and paid for by the Swedish Jewish communities, which described them as “monuments,” that were placed over each victim’s grave. These were sometimes engraved with incorrect information about the victims, including their name, country of origin, and/or birthdate. As the victims’ loved ones and survivors sought to personally commemorate the dead, however, they found their requests denied.During the next decade, more substantial monuments were erected near the victims’ graves in a handful of cemeteries. But some of these also proved to be sites of contested memory, with at least one instance of a Swedish-Jewish group rebuffing survivors’ involvement in the establishment of a monument to the victims. In other cemeteries, no monuments to Jewish victims were erected at all, even while monuments to non-Jewish victims were. Thus, although efforts to memorialize Jewish victims of the Holocaust began early in Sweden, these were inconsistent and tended to be dominated by the Swedish-Jewish minority rather than the surviving remnant in Sweden.

Vikings and the Viking Age have never been more popular than in the 21st century. Vikings can be found around every corner: in museums, computer games, politics, comics, ancestry claims via DNA tests, and environmental narratives. Their representation is also found throughout Europe and can be considered part of its cultural heritage. The pervasiveness and malleability of the Vikings as an idea mean that they have been used in multiple ways. Therefore, it is an important responsibility for researchers to critically discuss how the Vikings and Viking Age are activated as a key aspect of European cultural heritage in many different contexts. It is also vital to investigate this phenomenon from different perspectives. Consequently, this volume reflects the multidisciplinary nature of Viking studies and includes research in the fields of history, archaeology, museology, and religious and medieval studies. The aim of this volume is to present new research and critical perspectives on the Vikings and Viking Age as a part of a (white) European, and even global, cultural heritage context, especially with regards to public history in museums, re-creation, and re-enactment. 1 

This chapter discusses Viking re-enactment within the domain of public history in present-day Europe. Defining re-enactment as an attempt to re-create some aspect of the past in a performance set in the present within a realistic-fantastic spectrum, the chapter goes on to discuss two distinct but overlapping sub-genres of Viking re-enactment: (a) the top-down re-enactments initiated by professionals at universities or institutions such as museums and (b) the bottom-up re-enactments initiated within the re-enactment scene itself. Lastly, it identifies and discusses new trends and suggested directions within the European Viking re-enactment scene in the early 21st century. 

This chapter explores how the two contemporary political parties, the Sweden Democrats and the Danish People’s Party, use the Vikings and the Viking Age as symbols in their national mythmaking. It examines the political dimensions of public history and the way in which these parties draw historical parallels between the Viking Age and the present in order to call for action. The relationship between cultural heritage and the creation and upholding of national identities in the two parties’ use of history is given special attention. The comparison between the parties shows that the Sweden Democrats are affected by their ties to Swedish National Socialism in their early years and that when they later tried to appeal to a wider public, they adopted a more subtle strategy in their depiction of the Vikings. On the other hand, The Danish People’s Party continuously use the Vikings and the Viking Age to establish a national identity in the same manner as in the wider Danish community, meaning that a need for changes in their history writing did not occur. 

This chapter studies the production processes of information funded by Swedish government agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, made with attitude- and behavioural-changing purposes. The aim is to historicise entanglements between cultural policy and information practices in non-cultural policy areas. Employing an information-by-proxy strategy, Swedish non-cultural agencies utilised cultural workers to produce “creative” information and to obscure persuading intents, yet the agencies became dependent on the cultural proxies for artistically enhanced information. Empirically, to examine this phenomenon, examples are used from three areas of politics: health, foreign aid, and immigration, drawn from archival sources. The chapter examines: (1) the tactics and objectives involved in the rapprochement between agencies and cultural workers and (2) how we can trace and conceptualise material produced by cultural workers as governmental information along with the resulting ambiguities regarding content and sender which the strategy led to. Problematising the concepts of instrumentalisation and policy attachment in cultural policy research and operationalising the notion of artification drawn from aesthetic theory, the chapter shows that culture was not instrumentalised in traditional terms – to legitimise its own existence as a policy field – but to strengthen non-cultural policy fields through its power to artistically enhance – or artify – governmental information. 

The introduction to this edited collection situates the volume in relation to previous research on strategies and tactics in the humanities and the social sciences. Taking a media historical point of departure, a key ambition with this volume is to foreground the dialectic relationship between strategies and tactics in what we call the long twentieth century. Drawing on examples from a range of different countries and world regions, and highlighting the infrastructures, entanglements, and institutions involved, this book makes a case for a tactical turn and for media tactics as an important scholarly study object in itself, and the historically informed approach as a way of exploration. Lastly, the introduction provides a short overview of the chapters that have been included in this volume. 

In this afterword, Marie Cronqvist, Fredrik Mohammadi Norén, and Emil Stjernholm tie together the chapters in Media Tactics in the Long Twentieth Century and summarise some of the book's key themes. Three key knowledge contributions are highlighted. First, the volume foregrounds tactics as a study object in itself, not just the effects or outcomes of strategic thinking. Second, the book counters the presentism of contemporary studies by adding a historical perspective. And third, by theoretically disentangling the concept of strategy from an abstract, contemporary buzzword to concrete, hands-on actions, some of the many complexities of operational media strategies and media tactics are revealed. 

This chapter offers a critical account of some important aspects of sf comics since the late 1960s, focusing mostly on developments in US contexts. It begins by outlining some terminological and conceptual concerns that limit its treatment of the topic. It then focuses on so-called superhero comics, discussing the variety of sf tropes and framing that have characterised the genre formation since the late 1960s and highlighting the impact of historical and social developments can have on superhero sf storytelling. The chapter also discusses superhero comics in relation to political developments and to the different, often conservative or reactionary, politics they can promote, citing examples of super-Cold Warriors, but also antiracist superheroes, and more. It further highlights the impact superhero comics can have on the world outside these texts and addresses their role and impact on synergistic marketing strategies. This is followed by discussions of sf graphic novels and anthology comics in the US and elsewhere in relation to their political messaging. The chapter ends by gathering up these threads into a discussion about how utopian, dystopian and otherwise speculative comics are sometimes used to offer critiques of power, citing feminist, antiracist, Afrofuturist, Africanfuturist and otherwise radical sf stories that challenge the historically common conservative and whiteness-centring frames of earlier sf comics.

I idéhistorikern Maria Josephsons bok Lex THX genomförs en historisk beskrivning av veterinärmedicinaren Elis Sandberg och hans kavlthymusextrakt THX. Det är en bok som belyser hur THX blev en omstridd behandlingsform under 1950-talet och där Sandberg hamnade i centrum för diverse strider att få fortsätta sin produktion. Det är också en studie som ger en närgången bild av det hopp behandlingen gav många svårt sjuka människor som inte fann den bot eller lindring som de önskade i den traditionella hälso- och sjukvården. Det är därmed en studie som utifrån detta alternativa preparat undersöker gränslandet till en framväxande välfärdsstat och med den en stark medicin. Det är helt enkelt en berättelse om hur den medicinska vetenskapen blev modern. 

The study explores the meaning-making of cultural heritage in school field trips to five sites in the region Östergötland in Sweden. It treats the materiality of the place and experiences of the guides and the pupils, obtained in school as well as in other contexts, as meaning-making resources during the site visits. It emphasises that sites should be seen as processes, open to interpretations and reinterpretations. The visitor is steered by expectations and common values as well as by the ways in which the heritage site is displayed and presented. In the present study, both adults (guides) and children (pupils) are defined as visitors. The authors draw on theories from history education research and from heritage studies when interpreting how pupils encounter heritage sites, they underline the centrality of 'the flesh and embodied agency' in the experience of sites. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Vikings have found a place in nearly every medium invented since their passing. The comics medium is no different; it has served as a vast and protean global archive of stories rooted in and transforming received Old Norse tradition and representation for nearly a century. The extent and significance of this archive and the comics medium’s contribution to remain still largely unstudied. When discussed, comics are often either measured against supposedly more “authentic” forms of Viking or Norse representation or disparaged. This chapter attempts to bring the two fields closer together, and in so doing challenge the views that the emergence of Old Norse memory-construction in comics is, on the one hand, a sign that this memory is losing its relevance and meaning and, on the other, that we can understand what is being done in these comics without looking to the longer history of memory and reception. It does so by surveying global Old Norse-themed comics and identifying some general trends, similarities, and differences. Particular attention is given to two aspects: first, to the emphatic whiteness of many characters; and, second, on the growth in recent decades of feminist or recuperative uses of the Norse past in relation to gender representation. 

Historia kan i grunden sägas vara ett återberättat urval av förflutenhet. Det innebär att historia aldrig är detsamma som förflutenhet utan en bearbetning av densamma. Syftet med studien är att undersöka de spänningsfyllda gränsytorna mellan historia, sanning och fiktion. Detta görs genom att undersöka ett publikhistoriskt konstprojekt i gränslandet mellan hantverk, konstnärskap, berättarkonst, historia och myt.

Konstprojektet handlade om sökandet efter en fantastisk skatt, Grendels skatt, såsom den omnämns i det tidigmedeltida Beowulfkvädet. Det handlade med om att hitta (på) en skatt från sagans värld genom att återskapa utvalda föremål som om de var verkliga artefakter från den forntid där hjälte- berättelsen om Beowulf utspelar sig.

Beowulfkvädet uttolkats i mängder av sammanhang alltsedan medel- tidens slut. Det finns en lång rad nya uttolkningar bara i det sena 1900-talet och det tidiga 2000-talet. Bland annat har kvädet genom Beowulfkännaren J. R. R. Tolkiens litterära verk kommit att influera den moderna fantastiken på ett högst påtagligt sätt. Som ett nutida kulturfenomen är Beowulfkvädet i allra högsta grad någonting levande.

Grendels skatt-projektets uttolkning av Beowulf utgör den analytiska ingång varifrån gränsytorna mellan historia, sanning och fiktion ska undersökas i denna studie. Utöver detta studeras även historiska återskapanden av den slags tidigmedeltida europeiska germanska elitkultur där Beowulf en gång framförts. Här undersöks återskapanden och deras sanningsanspråk i mötet mellan nuet och det förflutna. Boken berör framför allt tidigmedeltida germansk elitkultur i norra Europa under tidsperioden 500- 700-tal, samt olika uttryck av dess (åter)skapanden i tidigt 2000-tal.

Teoretiskt används i boken en kulturanalytisk ansats där kultur definieras som de praktiker och system i kommunikationen människor emellan där mening skapas. Kvädet är inte bara en levande kulturskatt, det kan även sägas ha samhällsrelevans. Den bär således fortfarande på mening idag kring olika slags beständiga dilemman, såsom kärlek, död, hjältemod, maktmissbruk, offervilja, krig, vänskap och girighet.

Viking Heritage and History in Europe presents new research and perspectives on the use of the Vikings in public history, especially in relation to museums, re-creation, and re-enactment in a European context.

Taking a critical heritage approach, the volume provides new insights into the re-creation of history, imagining the past, interpretation, ambivalence of authenticity, authority of History, remembrance and memory, medievalism, and public history. Highlighting the complexity of the field of public history today, the fourteen chapters all engage with questions of historical authenticity and authority. The volume also critically examines the public’s reception, engagement with, and interpretation of the Viking Age and the concepts of who these individuals were. Each chapter illuminates an aspect of these themes in relation to museums, leisure activities, politics, tourism, re-enactment, and popular culture – all from the vantage point of Viking cultural heritage.

Viking Heritage and History in Europe is one of the first volumes to examine the use and role of the Vikings within the field of public history, both past and present. The book will be of interest to those engaged in the study of heritage, public history, history, the Vikings, vikingism, medievalism, and media history.

In this contribution, we analyse the parliamentary minutes debating the issue of women’s voting rights in Sweden from the start of the two-chamber parliament in 1866 until 1918, when women were finally granted voting rights on the same terms as men. We find that most arguments belonged to one of two broad categories: those that were against women’s suffrage as a matter of principle, and those that could accept women’s right to vote but not at the present time. The arguments of principle were without exception used by conservatives, and while some liberals did occasionally use postponement arguments, this was also the realm of conservative argumentation. Not a single social democrat argued against female voting rights in the analysed minutes. Furthermore, we find that the conservative arguments of principle were remarkably stable and essentially did not change during the 52 years our analysis covers. The postponement arguments varied more over time as some of the more common ones, such as the need for further investigation, lost credibility. 

The purpose of this article is to explore moments of shared authority when working with archived interviews and to suggest how the use and understanding of shared authority as an analyticalconcept might be advanced and elaborated in conjunction with the concept of intersectionality,borrowed from another research field (in this case, gender studies). We aim to hear and acknowledgethe different voices, dialogues and silences of those who documented and those who aredocumented. We listen to their archived voices and dialogues to find moments of shared authority andanalyse how the shared authority plays out during the interviews through intersectional analyses of the archived interview narratives.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Malin Thor Tureby interviews Henry ‘Hank’ Greenspan aboutseveral of his projects involving ‘sharing authority’, what Greenspan calls ‘collaboration’. Collaboration has taken many forms in his work, most centrally his practice of interviewing the same Holocaust survivors multiple times over months, years, and with some survivors, decades. Unlike conventional testimony, which concerns declaration, that is, ‘this I witnessed’, Greenspan’s approach emphasises exploration, what one survivor called ‘learning together’. Thus, in the context of deepening conversations,survivors reflected on the impact of their wartime experiences throughout the years that followed; theirvarying choices about what to share and not share at different times and circumstances; and theirperceptions of their listeners, and popular ‘Holocaust memory’, in general. Greenspan also discusses a memoir he co-authored with a survivor, and a play, REMNANTS, which is based on his decades of conversations with survivors. He reflects on the process of co-authorship, the role of personal chemistryin interviews, the claims of the verbatim, writing in the service of conversation and the relationshipsbetween artistic and scholarly ways of knowing.

Most of the history education research that addresses controversial issues suggests that disputes arising in the history classroom are rooted in students’ diverse identities that relate differently to history. Therefore, a history education that wants to ease tensions must try both to make these different identities and their relations to history visible and to enable an understanding of different relations to history based on identity. Starting with Gadamer’s concept of historically effected consciousness, this article outlines a model consisting of ontological third-order concepts and historical empathy in the history education as a suggestion to enable and corroborate constructive deliberative discussions in the history classroom. 

In the context of compulsory schooling in Sweden, this article discusses the shift from what was often called "the Tattare problem" to, later, "the Gypsy question." The article frames the discussion with reference to Michel Foucault and his concepts of discipline power and pastoral power. The central question addressed is how the schools dealt with students from these groups. Children, especially their care and handling, were an important focus of welfare politics in Sweden. This meant that childhood was a significant field of governance, which became obvious in schools' work with "Tattare" and "Gypsy" children. This article highlights how the tone towards these groups changed, especially in the 1940s. Over time, these students were seen as more malleable by institutions and their agents, which exerted pastoral power by guiding and leading them in order to shape the minds of these future citizens.

What a politician says in the parliament is not always what gets printed. In turning spoken words into printed records, the language changes, often towards formalization. The stenographers play a key role in this linguistic transformation. Their job is to align oral speeches with linguistic norms and parliamentary nomenclature. In this context, the formulaic trumps the personal. In our paper, we target these formulaic transformations, which we call the stenographic bias. Our analytical work is guided by the following research questions: In what ways are the printed records shaped by the stenographic bias? And what mechanisms are part of shaping this bias?

The paper is empirically based on stenographic guidelines defining language norms and procedural rules, primarily from the 1980s and 2020s, as well as supplemented parliamentary material. To study the formulaic language over time and how language norms and rules affected the printed debate records on the aggregated level, we make use of a recent annotated dataset of Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2020. By combining close reading and distant reading we aim to identify and discuss cases and phrases that shed light on the way stenographic norms and procedures have influenced parliamentarians’ speeches as they are recorded in the protocols.

The Swedish sport of bandy has been declared dead for a hundred years. Still, the sport survives as an ancient Swedish treasure. Neither the modernity of ice hockey, nor floorball, nor climate change has managed to knock it out. The exoticism of bandy is similar to that of the sour herring. Bandy started in the country’s most exclusive milieus – among the aristocracy and university elites – but today represents sparsely populated working-class areas. The Swedish Championship final, played since 1907, has retained its magic as Sweden’s oldest major annual sporting event. The supporter culture around the final has a long history. Not even football has been able to show as large a number of traveling supporters to a match. Nostalgia has long been the hallmark of the sport. Women’s bandy has an equally long and exciting history. During the 2000s, the sport of bandy was substantially modernized. In a short time, it left its dependence on nature and moved into indoor halls, arenas that guaranteed a good ice surface. Fans, however, did not quite accept the changes out of a sense of nostalgia. This study focuses on the sport of bandy and its complex relationship to modernity, the natural environment, nationalism, and nostalgia.

In the study presented in this article, the aim is to further the understanding regarding the differences between pupils (aged 15-16) from schools with low or high socio-economic status (SES), regarding the amount and diversity of content knowledge in history that they have acquired by the end of compulsory schooling. Following a definition of historical content knowledge, we situate the concept in relation to other aspects of the history school subject. This is done to visualize historical content knowledge's central role in more complex aspects of the subject. The empirical material used in the study is pupils' responses on both selected and constructed response items on the Swedish national test in history. In the study, a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches is used. The results show not only that pupils in low-SES schools provide fewer examples of historical content knowledge. We can also establish that the historical content knowledge of pupils from high-SES schools represents several perspectives while there are few perspectives present in the responses from pupils in low-SES schools. The results are used to discuss how the differences between pupils in low- and high-SES schools may affect their possibilities for educational success and active participation in society.

Historieundervisning i en digital samtid: Innehåll, kontexter och verktyg – Presentation av resultat från pågående forskning 

Den omfattande digitaliseringen av svensk skola är en del av global process. Skolans digitalisering har i stor utsträckning genomförts ovanifrån och ambitionerna har varit stora. Införandet av digital teknik sägs ge möjligheter till ökad delaktighet, motivation och nya perspektiv i undervisningen. Digitaliseringen är i stor utsträckning en ideologisk och ekonomisk företeelse, snarare än en epistemologisk och kunskaperna om digitalisering i relation till historieundervisning är mycket begränsade. Det är därför av vikt att undersöka vilka konsekvenserna den pågående digitaliseringen får. Avhandlingens huvudsakliga syfte är att historieundervisningen på grundskolans högstadium och fokus ligger på att beskriva vilka olika former och innehåll undervisningen tar i ett digitaliserat klassrum. Genom detta blir frågor om narrativitet, historiekultur och historiemedvetande relevanta att sätta i relation till den undervisning som bedrivs. Parallellt med historiedidaktiska frågor blir också den digitala tekniksens specifika möjligheter att bidra till en förändrad historieundervisning relevant. Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i det teoretiska ramverk som benämns som TPACK och som är en välspridd modell för att förstå teknik i relation till undervisning. I avhandlingen kommer denna modell bearbetas för att bättre kunna fungera som ett stöd att analysera lärares yrkespraktik. Under höstterminen 2023 genomfördes avhandlingens första delstudie. Detta var en kvantitativ enkätstudie där totalt 540 lärare från hela landet deltog. Presentationen avser att presentera några preliminära resultat från denna delstudie i relation till ett pågående arbete med utveckling av en teoretisk modell för att förstå historieundervisning i en digital skola. 

This paper presents results from a large-scale study of history teachers in Swedish secondary schools. The study examines perceptions of history, content being taught, teaching methods and use of digital technology. The study uses the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework to analyse the results together with narrative theory.

The main results indicate that knowledge of the past and contemporary perspectives from a canonical tradition are prioritised, together with a content-based lecture-style pedagogy. The use of digital technology does not seem to challenge methods or bring new perspectives to history teaching. However, to fully understand history teaching with technology, a framework that emphasises all parts of history education is needed. This calls for further development of the TPACK model, which is further discussed in this article.

The main target of this study is to make a comparative analysis between the presence or absence of historical thinking competencies in the official curricula of Gymnasieskola (Sweden) and Bachillerato (Spain). To reach this goal, a mixed instrument was designed, both qualitative and quantitative, to analyze the offical documents. The results show a great presence of “historical consciousness” in the case of Sweden and the use of historical sources and evidences in the case of Spain.

Issues of validity and reliability have an impact on the construction of tests. Since the 2010s, there has been increasing emphasis in Sweden on enhancing reliability in the large-scale test system to combat grade inflation. This study aims to examine how this increased focus on reliability has affected how the nature of historical knowledge is presented in the national test in history. Accordingly, it addresses the following research question: what kinds of epistemic cognition does the test communicate to students? The concept of epistemic cognition builds on Kuhn et al.’s discussion on epistemic understanding, regarding the balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of knowledge. Furthermore, the concept of companion meanings is used to establish a connection between the items in the test and students’ epistemic cognition. The findings show that the selected-response tasks predominantly communicate an objective dimension of historical knowledge, while the constructed-response tasks communicate both subjective and objective dimensions of historical knowledge. The findings regarding the offerings of epistemic cognition are discussed in relation to validity, reliability, item formats and classroom practices.