History textbooks often cause friction in diplomatic relations between nations, especially between East Asian countries. Several studies have demonstrated that revisions to history textbooks can be the result of changes in a state's interests, resulting in different, often conflicting, accounts of historical events in history textbooks that…

Existing research in global and social studies education has focused on methods, tools, and instruments to impart dispositions and skills for global learning, with little research pertaining to key global content knowledge. In this manuscript, the authors consider the use of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a prospective global…

Using a multiple case study design, I examine how public high school students (n = 17) make sense of narratives about defining events with which they have specific heritage connections. Focusing on 3 groups of students (Hmong, Chinese, and Jewish) studying 3 heritage events (respectively, the Vietnam War, Modern China, and the Holocaust), this…

International revulsion at the violation of human rights during World War II helped spark a global movement to define and protect individual human rights. Starting with the creation of war crimes tribunals after the war, this newfound awareness stimulated a concerted international effort to establish human rights for all, both in periods of war…

A visitor to a random sampling of Modern World History classes in the United States will find that the subject of "revolution" is a favorite for many students. Reading about and researching individuals and topics such as Tsar Nicholas II, Rasputin, Marie Antoinette and guillotines is never boring. Unfortunately, in too many classrooms,…

Informed by recurring international controversies, this study explores representations of the Second World War as official history in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean secondary-level textbooks and theorizes about how they influence and function as collective memories about this time period. Using grounded theory, it finds that the examined Japanese…

The legacy of crimes committed during the Second World War in East Asia is still a stumbling block for reconciliation and trustful cultural relations between South Korea, China and Japan. The presentation of this issue in history school books is in the focus of a heated public and academic debate. This book written by historians and pedagogues…

This article presents an analysis of the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall which reveals that both grew from unique political, historical, geographical, cultural, and economic circumstances. The purpose of this article is to provide new arguments for a debate that all too often has been waged with emotions, polemics, and misinformation. The…

Historians work in a discipline with few inherent concepts and are obliged to draw upon many fields in recreating the past. Yet authors of most school history texts, state and national standards and curriculum materials seldom incorporate economic analysis in their work. Just look at state standards that include Adam Smith and John Locke but draw…

In this study a group of elementary teachers use illustrations, rather than written text, to introduce their students to the peoples and places of the ancient silk routes. The illustrations are from two picture books; "Marco Polo," written by Gian Paolo Cesaerani and illustrated by Piero Ventura (1977), and "We're Riding on a…

One way that people learn, remember and communicate is visually. We combine past experiences with new visual information to construct meaning. In this study, elementary teachers introduced their students to the peoples and places of the ancient silk routes using illustrations from two children's picture books, "Marco Polo," written by…

On May 5-6, 2007, FPRI's Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education hosted 41 teachers from 17 states across the country for a weekend of discussion on Living Without Freedom. The Institute was held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. Individual sessions included; (1) The…

In this article, the author explores the conceptual framework of South Korea's high school world history curriculum, and the problems it has faced related to Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism. Through a description of the development of current and past curriculua, the author intends to make clear that in the traditional conceptual framework of Asia…

This bibliographic review of books discussing the events involved in the loss of China to communism in the five years after World War II identifies basic resources on China, works mostly from the American point of view owing to the lack of availability of objective Chinese Scholarship. (JH)

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…