The Japanese occupation of Malaysia during the Second World War has occupied a significant space in national history textbooks in Malaysia. The period has been associated with nationalist movements and independence from colonial rule. However, narratives of the Japanese occupation in school history textbooks have changed in terms of the importance…

A comparative analysis of Irish history at school in the two parts of Ireland from 1921 to the 1990s is proposed here through an examination of history curricula and textbooks. The main focus is on the 1980s and 1990s, which were pivotal decades, usually described as having brought about a gradual convergence between the Republic of Ireland and…

This study employed a qualitative content analysis design to examine the extent to which 8th and 11th-grade U.S. History textbooks, adopted by the State of Texas, foster historical empathy and disciplinary knowledge and skills in the subject of history through student engagement with textbook activities. The textbook activities collected for this…

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…

The time frame of this article covers the Portuguese transition to democracy in the 1970s until the 1990s, when democratic institutions operated fully. The focus lies on the way in which changes in the conceptualization of nature and society and their mutual relationship were reflected in secondary education textbooks. We explore whether and how…

History textbooks are less likely to be complete renderings of the truth than a series of stories textbook authors (and the many stakeholders who influence them) consider beneficial. Sam Wineburg describes how the process of writing history textbooks often leads to sanitized and inaccurate versions of history. As an example, he describes how the…

This study aims to reveal how the Turkish War of Independence was told in the history textbooks in elementary schools to the Republic of Turkey's first generation. The research has been carried out using the historical research method, one of the qualitative research methods. The data of the study have been collected through the primary school…

This article is based on a bibliographical data set of over 2,600 history textbooks from the post-1945 Soviet Union and eleven out of its fifteen successor states, including books on international, national, and regional or local history. Among these, it analyzes the illustrations used in 450 books that cover the period of the Second World War.…

This article considers the representation of the controversial issue of the Great Irish Famine (1845-50) in 27 recent Irish and UK history textbooks for the secondary level. Key contested issues -- imports and exports, the British government's laissez-faire economic policy, providentialist interpretations, and victim--perpetrator discourses --…

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States, people immediately compared the attack with the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor sixty years prior. In this article, we explore how US and world history textbooks published shortly after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 depicted and contextualized both events. The textbooks…

Nation-building in modern China at the beginning of the twentieth century had to manage the strain between ethnic nationalism and the claim of a multi-ethnic national identity. This study focuses on how history textbooks defined China and addressed this paradox. Based on the qualitative content analysis of eight popular middle school history…

This article analyzes the presentation of the Second World War in the multimedia "history parks" of the Russian educational project "Russia My History." In these exhibition complexes, modern digital technologies offer visitors a "revolutionary" way to discover Russian history. The article first explores the history…

As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore's nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published…

Despite decades of research to the contrary, public discourse continues to insist on the direct power of curriculum to shape student learning, rather than acknowledge the complex and situated ways that teachers and curricular materials interact to shape enacted instruction. In this paper, we use a model of curriculum enactment to illustrate the…

The primary purpose of this article is to analyze how the origin of the Cold War is represented in Turkish history textbooks for general secondary school education for the twelfth grade. The author examined three history textbooks, which are only approved by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) for teaching the course of Contemporary Turkish…