The international situation of history didactics as an academic discipline is characterized by the fact that many basic disciplinary concepts often differ considerably: The same or similar terms denote different concepts or vice versa comparable concepts not only have various names but also hold different positions in the respective disciplinary…

This article examines the presentation of West Germany's "economic miracle" and East Germany's planned economy in school textbooks published between 2014 and 2016. The textbooks tell a success story of the "social market economy" that hardly takes into account the academic research of the last forty years. The results…

This article traces discursive shifts in the ways in which imperialism and European colonialism have been dealt with in the classroom in relation to the German history textbook "Time for History" ("Zeit für Geschichte"), which was published in 2010. It explores how the textbook's representation of German colonial rule in…

Many scholars working on history education have stressed that, in order to "do history," a congruent relation between substantive and procedural knowledge is required. In response to this argument, this article emphasizes the need to consider pupils' relations to substantive knowledge. With reference to history textbooks currently used…

This study examined the role of history education for nation building in Ethiopia, Germany Rwanda, South Africa, Switzerland, and USA using a comparative research method. Student textbooks and syllabi were the main data sources. Document review was the principal data-gathering tool and the data was analysed qualitatively. Findings revealed that…

The topic of this study is how Swedish students aged 15-16 use causal reasoning in history when given a high-stakes task about explaining a historically significant event, the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. The study is based on student texts from the Swedish national test in history. The student texts are mainly analysed with regards to how…

In 1924 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a volume investigating the teaching of school history in former belligerent states in Europe. The project sought to reconcile former enemies through mutual understanding and educational exchange and reflected a widely held belief that although the military conflict had finished, its…

This article reviews an extensive study of Israeli secondary school general history curricula and textbooks since the establishment of the state in 1948 until the present day. By analyzing the way in which Germany is presented in various contexts, the findings of the study indicate that, while the textbooks reflect a shift from an early censorious…

This article draws on memory studies and media studies to explore how memory practices unfold in schools today. It explores history education as a media-saturated cultural site in which particular social orderings and categorizations emerge as commonsensical and others are contested. Describing vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork in German…

On May 4, 2006, French and German cultural ministers announced the publication of "Histoire/Geschichte", the world's first secondary school history textbook produced jointly by two countries. Authored by a team of French and German historians and published simultaneously in both languages, the book's release drew considerable public…

At a time when the power of schools and both state and federal education authorities to guide young people's sense of belonging is being challenged by multilingualism, by the claims of supra- and subnational regions and minorities, by memories of national catastrophes and crimes, and by out-of-school educational media, this collection of essays…

The middle of the 1990s saw the creation of a French-German-Swiss history textbook supported by the European Commission. Disseminated to school instructors in the Upper Rhine, it received generally positive reviews, but ended up on the dusty shelves of school libraries. This result was due to several factors, which are analysed in this article.…

The book is entitled History Wars in the Classroom: Global Perspectives and examines how ten separate countries have experienced debates and disputes over the contested nature of the subject, for example the "Black Armband" and "Whitewash" factions in Australia who adopt opposingly celebratory or denigratory views of Australian…

The Second World War stands as the most devastating and destructive global conflict in human history. More than 60 nations representing 1.7 billion people or three quarters of the world's population were consumed by its horror. Not surprisingly, therefore, World War II stands as a landmark episode in history education throughout the world and its…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2013 proceedings: (1) Teaching About Asia in a Social Science Education Program (Cyndi Mottola Poole and Joshua L. Kenna); (2) Teaching Students about…