Reddit mentions: The best sweden history books

> I would be interested in reading a good history of Sweden (in English) if you have any recommendations. Websites or movies would be great too.

You got some replies about food, but I thought I'd give some tips on this one!

A History of Sweden by Hernan Lindqvist
A Journey through Swedish History by Herman Lindqvist
A history of Sweden by Lars O Lagerqvist

These are more general books about the history of Sweden, by Swedish historians. Herman Lindqvist in particular is fairly well known here as an author of popular history books. This page has a list of books about Swedish history, though I don't know the authors.

Hope you find it interesting!

Best memoir I've read to date:
http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Shores-Viktor-Leonov/dp/0804107327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301539345&sr=8-1

A few other good ones:
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Sniper-Eastern-Front-Pilyushin/dp/1848841205/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

http://www.amazon.com/GUNS-AGAINST-REICH-Memoirs-Artillery/dp/1844159310/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

A very well written account of Poltava and warfare in the eighteenth century:
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-That-Shook-Europe-Poltava/dp/1860648479/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

Best WWII fiction:
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Glory-Steven-Edward-Rustad/dp/157566397X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301539373&sr=8-1

Steven Pressfield has a lot of great stuff, although I hated his book on Rommel. But try 'Gates of Fire':
http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Fire-Novel-Battle-Thermopylae/dp/055338368X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301539446&sr=8-1

Anything by Bernard Cornwell.

There is a book the covers the archaeological dig with drawing of the armor with theories of how it was constructed.

Here is a pretty amazing website that has reconstructions of the body armor.

Here's a book I like >>>> "Nothing to do with Islam"

Some lesser known books about the Islamification of Europe that I recommend:

East Meat

Enemy of the state

Dark Albion: Requiem for Britain

Fistfights with Muslims in Europe (better than the title suggests. Basically a travelogue of an American in Europe whom is coming to terms with a continent undergoing profound change)

Sweden in a time of Immigration: How the Sweden Democrats turned the elite into a frenzy

We broke the German ciphers. After the occupation of Norway, the Nazis had demanded Sweden let them use the telegraph line from Norway through Sweden to Germany. As the Swedish military Chief-of-Staff had recommended , the government 'protested like hell and then thanked god for the opportunity'. Immediately setting about wiretapping the lines.

The Brits talk all day and make movies about the Enigma (which the Poles did much of the work for) but that was a small portable device or use in the field. For cable communications the 100+ kg giant Siemens and Halske T52 was used. It had 10 rotors (compared to 3 or 4 on the Enigma). It was also more secretive as it'd been developed for exclusive use by the German government. (the Enigma had initially been sold commercially on the open market)

Anyway, the brilliant mathematician Arne Beurling, who'd already found a vulnerability in the Swedish military cipher machines in the 1930s managed -through means he never revealed - in only a few weeks to reconstruct the function of the machine and find a number of weaknesses in it. Functional clone machines were built and they set about intercepting, cracking and mass-decoding the telegrams. In total over 200,000 secret German telegrams were broken by the Swedish C-Bureau (FRA) during the war.

The key goal was to keep the country on alert for any impending German invasion attempt or intent, which ultimately never happened though. So in the end the perhaps single most significant information gotten there was that the Swedish government was aware of the invasion of the Soviet Union about a month in advance. Something they in fact tipped off the British government about (but without revealing sources or methods), which it however seems the British dismissed as nothing but guesswork. There are some books about it all (even in English)

The signals intelligence service also had the largest number of casualties during the cold war, as the Soviets shot down a Swedish DC-3 radio-surveillance plane (and a Catalina rescue plane sent out to search for it) in 1952 over international waters in the Baltic, killing 8 people.

The Swedish agencies are a lot more secretive than their American counterparts. It's only in recent years FRA has even had a press office or given interviews, while the main HUMINT agency, KSI (Kontoret för Särskild Inhämtning, the 'Office of Special Retrieval') most certainly does not. So it's not a three letter acronym most people in the country have ever heard of. Official comment has been limited to confirming that "something by that name exists". They don't talk about who they are or what they do.

Most of the stuff that's been made public about what they've been doing in the last decades has been through leaks from other intelligence agencies they've collaborated with. Like the Snowden leaks supposedly showed they shared information on the Russian military. Which wasn't really an earth-shattering revelation. The other spies we know the most about are the ones who betrayed us for foreign powers, notably Stig Wennerström and Stig Bergling.

The most popular domestic spy books/films is the Hamilton series by Jan Guillou. Those aren't necessarily any more reality based than James Bond or Jason Bourne though. But Mark Hamill played the bad guy in one of the movies!

http://www.amazon.com/Swedish-Dilemma-European-Xenophobia-1990D2000/dp/0761831517/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2
my teacher wrote it. I had to read it for a paper due at the end of class.
It was a pretty bleak description of sweden.
he is of swedish origin and lived in sweden and his wife is swedish.

A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of Sweden as a Military Superpower Is a pretty good overview for that time. It covers the reigns of both Gustavus Adolphus & Charles, Focusing on the latter half of the 30 Years War & the Great Northern War.

Scandinavia is going through the same stuff that we are. Everyone knows about Sweden: mass immigration, refugees, no-go-zones, car bombings, grenade attacks, highest school arson rate of any OECD country, highest rape rate in Europe, increasingly totalitarian government, zero border controls, Barbara spectre, a huge drug epidemic, insolvent cities, insane amounts of white guilt and diversity propaganda, entire mass media apparatus controlled by two dual citizen Israeli oligarchs. Finland and Iceland are marginally better, but the entire western world is going through the same thing.

Red Ice has lots of interesting content about the situation in Sweden specifically:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=red+ice+sweden

Also, a good book about the activism that got them to where they are:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Sweden-Became-Multicultural-Eckehart/dp/9188667146

Sweden is genuinely fucked in many ways, but it's not really that different than Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and lots of other Western European countries. I think people were unnerved about Sweden because it has no reason to feel guilty for colonialism and has no responsibility to the rest of the world. I think a lot of people say: well, what happens to the French or British or Germans is just their comeuppance for colonialism, but Sweden never really did anything wrong. They were just naive and trusting and it backfired. There's a good book about Swedish multiculturalism and the Jewish activism that made it possible. He doesn't dwell on the Jewish aspect in the same way that Kevin MacDonald does in the Culture of Critique series, but he does go right to the heart of exactly who is responsible for setting in motion the massive changes in Sweden.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Sweden-Became-Multicultural-Eckehart/dp/9188667146

"the only country"... You get that Canada, America, Australia, and every European country allowed the same thing, right? Read these two books and try to figure out what the common denominator is:

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Critique-Evolutionary-Twentieth-Century-Intellectual/dp/0759672229

https://www.amazon.com/How-Sweden-Became-Multicultural-Eckehart/dp/9188667146/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1550359129&sr=1-1&keywords=how+Sweden+became+multicultural

Well, any textbook on warfare would cover this. It's really, really basic stuff. But I'm currently reading War and Society in Early Modern Europe if you're looking for a reading recommendation.

Part of that doctrine was also that we would "fight until help has arrived". For the people who designed it in the early Cold War era, it was quite obvious from where that help would come. Neutrality (or more correctly non-alignment) was a pragmatic policy to ease tensions and avoid Finland being forced into the Warsaw Pact, which was a feasible scenario were Sweden to join NATO. Covertly there was a lot of cooperation with the West. Sweden, in the fifties having one of the largest air forces in the world (not per capita, in absolute numbers!), essentially provided NATO's northern flank. There was no question whose side we were on.

What then happened in the seventies was that a new generation of politicians came along who actually believed in the public declarations of absolute neutrality between the two opposing blocks. The secret plans weren't passed along from the old guys and the plans withered.

Recommended reading: Robert Dalsjö, Life-Line Lost: The Rise and Fall of 'Neutral' Sweden's Secret Reserve Option of Wartime Help from the West, ISBN 978-9173350037.

There are a few books, they are mainly in Swedish and concern forensic examinations of wounds and armor from the battle of Visby in 1361.

Expensive- https://www.amazon.com/Armour-Battle-Wisby-Bengt-Thordeman/dp/1891448056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474986196&sr=1-1&keywords=Battle+of+Visby

The book has some very good analysis on how fighters died, i.e. being struck a disabling blow and then repeatedly hit after they had fallen, based on post mortem damage to their bones and armor. Visby was several skirmishes, not a packed formation battle. Melees happened, which were a looser type of combat.

This is a huge period of time, early modern and modern.

The 16th century is defined by religious wars, as is the first half of the 17th. I'm not sure of a good source on the Peasant Wars and such but I do know the absolute megalith you should get for the 30 Years' War (1618-1648) which is honestly the most important thing you could possibly study between 1492 - 1815 (the Early Modern Era traditionally). Yes, even more than the Napoleonic Wars. The greatest volume I've found on this is The Thirty Years' War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter Wilson.

I can not emphasize this enough: I know many people who consider the Early Modern Era to start in 1648 because of how fucking important the conclusion of this war was and what this war represented. It was the last religious war in Europe, it absolutely obliterated political lines and changed everything forever. It harkened the downfall of the top dogs at the time of Sweden, Poland, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and Spain. This is a fucking important war.

Another great war on probably the most tumultuous area of the Early Modern Era is The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558 - 1721 by Robert Frost. If you want a book (that is pricey as shit) on arguably the most important man of the Early Modern Era and who brought France into greatness and basically started Absolutism I'd check out The Wars of Louis XIV: 1667 - 1714.

In terms of the Napoleonic Wars...well...it's a fucking hard topic to cover. There's not a lot of good general histories out there. I'll page /u/DonaldFDraper and ask him to come in if he has anything particular he'd like to recommend but preemptively I'll recommend Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation And Tactics In The Army Of Revolutionary France, 1791-94 written by that same dude who wrote the Wars of Louix XIV. Ultimately you can't separate the military history from the Napoleonic period very easily so you're going to get a bit of both whether you like it or not (but I hope you do! It's a great period of study w.r.t. military history). While I haven't read it I have heard French Society in Revolution, 1789-1799 by David Andress is a good read. However my principal source on the Napoleonic Wars is The Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler. Yeah it's expensive, go find it cheap (or free) if you can online (because it does exist, found it before I actually buckled down and bought it) but it is the source on Napoleon. This should be the last book you get though and only if this period becomes a fascination with you.

After that I'd recommend The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870-1871 by Michael Howard and to help dispel some myths and give a general overview of the common perceptions of WWI The Great War: Myth and Memory by Dan Todman. If you want an overview of events leading up to the war along with the opening year or so I'd recommend the absolute megalith The First World War: Volume I: To Arms by Hew Strachan. This is the book you should get on your introduction to the First World War along with Myth and Memory. Read this one first though.