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…

Comparing narratives of the Soviet occupation in 1940 in current textbooks by two leading Lithuanian publishing houses, I claim that Lithuanian textbooks offer diverging accounts, which mirror to a large extent the opposing mnemonic frames supported by two rival political camps. I also show that the same textbooks tame those differences by…

This article explores a key claim underpinning Russian official memory politics, namely, the notion that Russia's past (and especially the role it played in the Second World War) is the object of a campaign of "historical falsification" aimed at, among other things, undermining Russian sovereignty, especially by distorting young people's…

In this article, we advocate for integrating select graphic novels into curricula for English language learners and emergent bilinguals to push against the dominant and harmful narratives that tend to be found in traditional history texts and curricula. We use "Vietnamerica" by Tran and "Escape from Syria" by Kullab et al. as…

Nation-states needed various ideological apparatuses when they wanted to eliminate traditional loyalties to the pre-modern era and establish a new superordinate identity. As frequently emphasised in conceptual discussions, two elements among these ideological apparatuses come to the fore: historiography and education. While social values that…

This article analyses history teaching in South Sudanese secondary schools and focuses on the interplay of local context, curricular intentions, and teachers' agency. Drawing on ethnographic data, the article focuses on how the main objectives of national unity and critical thinking are enacted by teachers in the classroom. Through theories of…

A textbook author reflects on the ethical and ideological choices she made in her quest to create a history book that would be relevant to demographically diverse high school students.

Michalinos Zembylas examines how history education can be reconceived in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of "hauntology," that is, as an ongoing conversation with the "ghost"--in the case of this essay, the ghosts of disappeared victims of war and dictatorship. Here, Zembylas uses hauntology as both metaphor and pedagogical methodology for…

Historians of American foreign relations are continuing to expand the ways in which they approach the Cold War. The range of perspectives has evolved thanks to the influence of emerging fields and new emphases in history. The end of the Cold War revealed the many ways in which the conflict was a protracted global war. But it also brought a renewed…

In this dissertation, I undertake a sequential analysis of an elaborate system of forces that contribute to the production of history textbooks in Pakistan. I review longitudinal series of data on education policies and history textbooks from 1938-2012, and examine the decision-making processes, which inform said policies and textbooks, at the…

Holocaust education in Slovakia stands at the confluence of diverse discourses of state and supra-national legitimation. Principles of national self-determination, minority rights, and political ideologies inform and lend credence to how Slovaks' national and state identities are narrated in Slovak history textbooks. For small nation-states with…

Using a mixed methodologies research method involving a survey and qualitative analysis, the article analyses a survey of Russian history secondary teachers on their perceptions of historical narratives in prescribed history textbooks. This recent survey of secondary history teachers represents one of the first international surveys of history…

Use of media in today's classrooms, from feature and documentary film to news clips streamed via the Web, has grown exponentially. Film can be a powerful medium for teaching and learning, but is often viewed as a neutral source of information. This collective case study focuses on two teachers who use documentary film to teach about controversial…

Because of its enormous significance to American history, the author wants her students to gain a rich understanding of the Battle at Gettysburg. She also would like them to make a strong emotional connection to it. She wants her students to engage with the Battle of Gettysburg on many levels--to become tangled up with the past. Her goal is to…

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…