The aim of this bachelor’s thesis is to analyze if there are differences in the way of explainingthe causes of The Great Emigration from Sweden to America in the late 1800s/beginningof the 1900s. Due to the researcher’s education the thesis has a didactic, and comparativeperspective between how history textbooks aimed for Middle School and High School andhow the exhibition Drömmen om Amerika (= The Dream of America), in Vaxjo, Sweden,explains this phenomena. A special analysis scheme is applied to the sources in a way to makeit clear to the reader how informative they are and how much effort they put in the explaining.

The outcome of the analysis shows that the exhibition gives the visitor a wider, deeper,and more informative depiction of The Great Emigration, compared to the textbooks’ moresummarized extracts. However, many teachers and pupils consider it difficult to applymuseums’ productions into the every-day-history-education in the classroom. In order tofollow the policy documents made for the school, teachers often use the adapted-for-school-curriculum-textbooks as a central part of the education, instead of museums. Comparing thetextbooks against each other, the analysis shows that the Middle-School-textbooks give morecauses to The Great Emigration but the High-School-textbooks explain the causes in a muchmore informative way.