1st Edition
Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Sweden and America, 1898–1945 Unsparing Honesty
1. Unsparing Honesty
Part 1: Becoming Alva, Becoming Gunnar
2. Alva’s Family on the Edge of Poverty
3. Alva in the Family Crucible
4. Alva and the Great Hunger
5. From Kalle Pettersson to Gunnar Myrdal
6. Gunnar the Outsider
Part 2: Alva and Gunnar
7. “Faith is that which the heart trusts”
8. “Souls as great as ours”
9. “How to operate on the heart”
10. “I was surprised that you understood me so well”
Part 3: Gunnar in Crisis, 1941
11. The Dialectic of Love and Power
12. Collapse and Catharsis
13. Trolls, Strindberg, and Faust
14. The Feminist Complex
15. Dilemmas of Gender and Race
Part 4: Alva in Crisis, 1944
16. Together and Separately
17. The Formation of the Psyche
18. Dream Diary
19. Politician’s Wife or Independent Woman?
Biography
Walter Anderson Jackson III (1950–2015) is best known for Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism,1938–1973 (1990), which analyzes the making of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) in relation to early twentieth-century Swedish and American social thought. Jackson grew up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement and earned a BA (mcl) from Duke and a PhD from Harvard. His life’s work was prompted by questions about racial inequality in the United States and the perspective a European social democratic thinker brought to this fraught issue. Jackson published numerous articles on white racial liberalism, African American sociologists and anthropologists, and theories of interracial relations. Beloved by students and the public for grounding the civil rights struggle in local history and highlighting the voices and viewpoints of participants, he appeared on the 2015 PBS program, “American Denial.”
