The Dovring Saga : A story of academic immigration

Folke Dovring was a medieval historian in Sweden who tried around 1950 to introduce new ideas about history based on statistical analysis and history from below, publishing two books on medieval agrarian history that still remain important. His attempts, however, were made in vain. In 1953 he left Sweden for an international career, devoting himself to the study of the agrarian history of Europe in the 20th century, and in 1960 he became a tenured professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Illinois, U.S.A.

Some major societal processes can be studied through the biography of Dovring. One involves European conservatism in the academic world. The second important process Dovring took part in was the expansion of American higher education. Dovring was one of the many scholars who left Europe in the 1950s to join the dynamic American academic community. When Dovring later shifted his focus from agrarian history to take up more political questions in the 1970s such as the oil crisis and environmental care his position became more isolated.