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This multidisciplinary volume reflects the shifting experiences and framings of Finnishness and its relation to race and coloniality. The authors centre their investigations on whiteness and unravel the cultural myth of a normative Finnish (white) ethnicity. Rather than presenting a unified definition for whiteness, the book gives space to the different understandings and analyses of its authors. This collection of case-studies illuminates how Indigenous and ethnic minorities have participated in defining notions of Finnishness, how historical and recent processes of migration have challenged the traditional conceptualisations of the nation-state and its population, and how imperial relationships have contributed to a complex set of discourses on Finnish compliance and identity. With an aim to question and problematise what may seem self-evident aspects of Finnish life and Finnishness, expert voices join together to offer (counter) perspectives on how Finnishness is constructed and perceived. Scholars from cultural studies, history, sociology, linguistics, genetics, among others, address four main topics: 1) Imaginations of Finnishness, including perceived physical characteristics of Finnish people; 2) Constructions of whiteness, entailing studies of those who do and do not pass as white; 3) Representations of belonging and exclusion, making up of accounts of perceptions of what it means to be ‘Finnish’; and 4) Imperialism and colonisation, including what might be considered uncomfortable or even surprising accounts of inclusion and exclusion in the Finnish context. This volume takes a first step in opening up a complex set of realities that define Finland’s changing role in the world and as a home to diverse populations.

How do we thoroughly historicize the voice, or integrate it into our historical research, and how do we account for the mundane daily practices of voice . . . the constant talking, humming, murmuring, whispering, and mumbling that went on off stage, in living rooms, debating clubs, business meetings, and on the streets? Work across the humanities has provided us with approaches to deal with aspects of voices, vocality, and their sounds. This article considers how we can mobilize and adapt such interdisciplinary methods for the study of history. It charts out a practical approach to attend to the history of voices—including unmusical ones—before recording, drawing on insights from the fields of sound studies, musicology, and performativity. It suggests ways to “listen anew” to familiar sources as well as less conventional source material. And it insists on a combination of analytical approaches focusing on vocabulary, bodily practice, and the questionable particularity of sound.

This short thought piece focuses on the novel contributions the authors of Lived Nation make to the study of the nation, and to the new history of experience. It discusses the historiographical origins of the new history of experience, especially in its links to the history of emotions, and the boundaries of this exciting new historical approach. It further points to promising innovations as other subfields start to implement this approach, specifically in the history of childhood and youth, and the history of disability.

This chapter takes up Monique Scheer’s suggestion that “the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical”. Hoegaerts applies this notion to primary school children, and to the arousal of love for the fatherland. How, this chapter asks, were children expected to acquire the vocabularies and practices connected to patriotism, and how did they appropriate what they were taught? Hoegaerts draws on a variety of sources relating to geography teaching in the nineteenth-century primary city schools of Antwerp (Belgium). Her dataset consists of manuals for geography, teacher education, correspondence and, most importantly perhaps, documents pertaining to the organization and content of school excursions, including reports of these trips written by pupils. Even though the latter bear the hallmarks of educational normativity, they show some level of agency, especially in the way pupils connected individual corporeal experiences and practices (such as seeing, walking, eating and singing) with the more collective and abstract notions of the nation and patriotism.

In order to introduce the special issue on “educational soundscapes” the editors, first of all, explore the intimate link between silence, sound and the production of social meaning. An acoustic history of education, so it is argued, cannot solely focus on silence nor can it solely focus on sound. After having demonstrated the necessity of taking into account sounds and silences at the same time, the term “educational soundscapes” consecutively is defined, historically contextualized and connected to the widely used concept of educationalization. Finally, the different contributions to the special issue are briefly introduced and connected to the main theme of the special issue, namely “educational soundscapes”.

At the heart of the nineteenth-century educational soundscape lies a paradox. Whilst “modern” classrooms generally strived for orderly silence, the goal of its educational practices was the production of competent “citizens”. Middle-class boys in particular were expected to acquire a voice fit for business, the professions, or even (political) public speech whilst quietly listening to a teacher. This silence within the educational institution has generally been understood as an element of discipline. In this paper I want to examine the paradox of the silent classroom and the speaking citizen. I will focus specifically on those instances where the clear goal of education was vocal sound (i.e. fluent speech, civilised pronunciation, and song) and look at how silence was mobilised by educators. I will argue that the silences employed in these educational practices were not (only) tools of order and discipline, but rather means to create a “borderland” where the leap between childhood and its uncivili...

This article focuses on the acoustic aspect of parliamentary government in nineteenth-century Britain, demonstrating the continued importance of speech and audibility for representatives in the reformed House of Commons. Notions of what constituted a proper parliamentary voice changed as electoral reforms, the rise of the “fourth estate,” and scientific discoveries in laryngology influenced evaluations of political speech. Most notably, rhetorical brilliance and a theatrical delivery lost legitimacy and were increasingly replaced by a “polite” and conversational style. The vocal sounds of modern, polite representatives were extensively transcribed and commented upon by journalists and satirists. By the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of the written press made the careful management of the vocal organs more, rather than less, politically relevant.

« Est-ce une maladie ou une habitude ? »Tout au long du XIXe siecle, les savoirs et les traitements relatifs au begaiement ont evolue considerablement. Plusieurs disciplines en plein essor revendiquaient un savoir d’autorite sur le sujet : phoniatres, laryngologues, elocutionnistes et psychanalystes se presentaient tous de diverses manieres comme des « experts » de la question. Parallelement, alors que les explications du phenomene du begaiement evoluaient, l’identite du begue s’est trouvee constamment re-inventee. Cet article montre comment l’evolution des explications et des traitements du begaiement au fil du XIXe siecle (de la representation « mecanique » d’une langue begue jusqu’aux theories neurologiques sur le cerveau begue a la fin du siecle, en passant par l’idee plus holistique d’un corps begue) a finalement debouche sur la construction d’une figure de begue expert du begaiement. Dorenavant plus considere comme la victime d’un trouble nerveux, le « begue » du tournant du siecle etait imagine comme le specialiste experimente d’un champ en cours d’institutionnalisation.

Is a broken heart forever? Or do the metaphor and feeling it describes have a history? Because they are intuitively recognizable and anchored in the body, emotions can appear as a universal human feature, present throughout the ages. Recent research into their history, however, shows that emotions and their expression have changed considerably over time. Not only the norms and expectations regarding emotive language have changed, but also the corporeal performance and experience of emotions. We 'feel' differently now. Moreover, emotive language and practice have been differentiated along different lines: men and women, adults and children, soldiers and civilians have shaped their identities according to changing emotional repertoires, and the associated corporeal actions. This special issue focuses on the links and tensions between emotions and the body, and how both were experienced and performed from the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century.

Tracing the legislative debates surrounding the introduction of a law on duelling in the Belgian penal code in 1841, this article examines the changing discourses and practices of ‘honour’ in the Belgian parliamentary hemicycle. The unique position of the nineteenth century Belgian duellist, created by the new law, allows for a new perspective on the history of the ‘civilization’ of the concept of honour in Europe, as it calls existing chronologies and accounts of either slow decline or continuous persecution of the duel into question. Rather than understanding the duel as a medieval tradition that is gradually made more cultured, civil and democratic (in that order) until it fades away in the twentieth century, this article argues that the 1841 legislation created room for a new, ‘modern’ duel in which the interaction between the male body and honour were renegotiated and the duel remained available as a way to allow for a man’s personal rehabilitation.

This article uses the case study of the Belgian grandes manoeuvres of 1882 and 1883 to explore the ways in which self-defined ‘all male’ spaces can contribute to the study and deconstruction of historical masculinities. Using the manoeuvres of the Belgian army at the end of the nineteenth century as a theatre of (military as well as civilian) corporeal and discursive practices, the simultaneous enactment of masculinity and nation is analysed. The material spaces in which these military exercises took place are understood as contingent creators instead of passive containers of masculinity: that is, rather than as a passive background to soldiers' movements, the champ de manoeuvres appears as an active stage, aiding the construction of a gendered military identity, but also challenging dichotomous understandings of gender. Likewise, the gaze upon both landscape and soldiers by different audiences plays an active part in the story of the construction of masculinity and nation: the act of recognition, perform...

The unequal relation between the infantry and the other arms was commonly known and the quality of the infantrymen was, throughout the nineteenth century generally understood as a problem. Soldiers’ lack of strength and stamina was expressed through metaphors of gender and age: the infantry was not only described as the other arms’ younger sister, its members were also referred to as ‘our little infantrymen’.1 When considering recruitment methods, however, it is obvious that the differences between infantry and cavalry in particular were related to class differences and the rational and corporeal qualities that were associated with good breeding.2 The plains of Beverloo and the sites where the grandes manœuvres were later held, became theatres of visible friction between the envisioned ideal of the army as a melting pot — in which all young men had equal opportunities to become civilised and autonomous men through corporeal exercise — and the insistence on multiple social hierarchies through the construction of different bodies for different ranks.

The creation of a national canon of (sung) music developing in conjunction with the construction of national institutions and their respective buildings, points to similar processes of nation building. As will become clear, the national canon was partly consciously created by composers and educators referring to current ideas on the role of music in the development of patriotism and citizenship.11 However, like the institutions constructed to represent the nation which used older, already existing buildings and foreign legal or political structures, the ‘new’ canon composed to acoustically represent the nation also harked back to already well-known folk-songs and borrowed from foreign compositions. Moreover, like the Palace of the Nation, the Beverloo camp and the Antwerp municipal schools, the national canon was always a work in progress, and a matter of permanent bricolage and re-imagination. Several publications presented themselves as a collection of nationally relevant or representative songs, but none of them had eternal life as several educational, military and artistic compilations were consecutively published throughout the century. Nevertheless, these compilations seem to present a sedimentation of an otherwise rather changeable and intangible phenomenon: as some songs disappeared throughout the century, while others kept being reproduced, a national canon seems to have developed.

On 25 August 1830, the beau monde of what would soon become Belgium was attending a performance of Auber’s romantic nationalist opera La Muette de Portici. Common lore of the Belgian ‘operetta rev- olution’ speaks of crowds inspired by the martial tones of the opera running into the streets of Brussels while chanting ‘vive la liberte’ and opening the fight with the army of the Dutch ruler. Negotiations with the Dutch King commenced a mere three days later. The revolution, so it seems, had consisted mainly of an excitable mob smashing factory machinery in their anger over their lack of employment, along with the display of the tricolore of Brabant-Hainaut. In September, however, fits of rebellion became more numerous and violent, and when Dutch prince Frederik entered Brussels with his army, he encountered a pop- ular fury that quickly turned into a national uprising. The skirmishes in the Warande-parc inspired the revolutionaries to form a provisional government but also inspired the creation of a Belgian nation that could be lived, written and sung.1

With the ‘operatic’ revolution, and the diplomatic, military and political consequences it entailed, a new nation was effectively born in 1830. Not only was a new and independent government (including a king) to be installed, the institutions of a modern nation state had to be built as well. In this chapter, three particular institutions are introduced, viewed through the lens of their architectural construction: parliament, the barracks and the primary school. As all three of them were thought of as material representations of the nation, their construction was connected to the constructions of citizenship performed by their inhabitants. Additionally, because they were all-male institutions, the identities articulated in these buildings participated in the development of a national common language of masculinity.

As mentioned before, the rising importance of travelling for both school-children and soldiers led to an expansion of the repertoire of hiking and marching songs that allowed for a synchronisation of feet while also carrying geographical and historical information on the country travelled.1 Several music manuals for primary schools at the end of the nineteenth century included a song by Peter Benoit and Jules De Geyter that seems to have been composed specifically for schoolchildren on excursions.2 The song stated the purpose of travelling and reinforced the national character of the kind of education these travels supposedly supported: travelling ‘throughout the entire country’, the young singers were expected to return smarter than they left, gathering knowledge in the East and South, according to the first verse, and in the West and North according to the second.

Even the politician’s disembodied voice, the ‘voice and nothing more’ presupposes the presence of a body from which it is emitted. As Mladen Dolar in his call for a ‘theory of the voice’ has aptly stated, the voice appears as something closely associated to both meaning and the body: it is the ‘link which ties the signifier to the body’, but belongs to neither or both.1 Studying the acousmatic voice, the voice emitted from a body that is made invisible, presents the researcher with ‘materiality at its most intangible’. A fleeting object that disappears once it has been called to life, a ‘bodily missile which has detached itself from its source, emancipated itself, yet remains corporeal’.2 In fact, in the archives, the emancipated voice appears as entirely intangible. It has turned into written discourse, and relating the marks voices have left to the body that originally produced them is a tenuous endeavour. Even the most vivid descriptions of voices cannot convey the temporality and the corporeality of the voice. Yet, the archive does contain a number of metaphors on the voice, its production and its construction. Moreover, the sediments of speech and song on paper retain the distinctions made between the sounds of different voices, relating them to specific bodies.

This article calls for a heightened attention to women’s voices in the history of education, arguing that the articulation of gender is not only ‘legible’ as bodily inscription, but audible within ...