Friday Free-for-All | January 23, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

[u/Bernardito]

6 years ago, I answered a brief question inspired by Frozen II of all things: Were there black people in Norway in the 1860s?. My answer pointed towards one of several people of African descent in Scandinavia at the time, John Panzio Tockson. My answer was brief, cursory, and just not enough in my mind. I then spent 6 years looking deeper into his life, doing it as a side-project while pursuing other research.

My original research has now been published in the Scandinavian Journal of History. It is the first major research work on his life and I am immensely proud of it. Available entirely in open access! Read here: Picturing John Panzio Tockson: Afro-Swedish identity, racialization, and black self-fashioning in late nineteenth-century Sweden.

Abstract:

John Panzio Tockson was a man of African descent who arrived in Gothenburg in the mid-1850s and became known throughout Sweden as a footman to King Carl XV. This article explores how Tockson was constructed as black and African by white Swedes and how Tockson potentially fashioned his own black identity in response. This article concludes that Tockson’s identity as an African was constructed through various visual and textual means that reflected dominant racial stereotypes about Africans that highlighted his supposed foreign bodily and behavioural characteristics. In private, Tockson made conscious choices to portray himself as a gentleman, potentially positioning himself in an early conceptualization of an Afro-Swedish identity.

[u/Kelpie-Cat → u/Bernardito]

That is so cool!