The shortcomings of the current English secondary school history curriculum have been widely discussed since its inception in 2013. Less widely explored, however, are the narratives underpinning a key classroom resource: textbooks. In this paper, I review nine history textbooks currently in use in schools across the country, drawing on…

Textbooks, as a curriculum document text, are subject to nonlinear entry and points of interpretation and implementation. The interpretation of its content is dependent on the reader or the writer, thus making it open to multimodal ways of meaning-making that underscore rhizomatic tendencies. Delueze and Guattari ("A thousand plateaus:…

Peter Conolly-Smith, a history professor at Queens College, uses the textbook "The American Promise," since 1998, and now in its seventh edition. He has been using this book for twenty years, and it has accompanied him from one school to another, providing the backbone of his post-1865 survey course. The relationship he has developed…

The Soweto Uprising comprised a series of protests led by secondary school students in South Africa that began on 16 June 1976. Historians and political analysts concur that the Soweto Uprising was a watershed in the national liberation struggle and ushered in the demise of the apartheid system. This article examines the presentation of the Soweto…

The study focuses on the content and extent of teaching of Russian history, or history of Russian culture and civilization, in the teaching of history in the states of the Visegrád Group (i.e. in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia). In each of these states, the subject of history (sometimes in different names) has a different status,…

There is a great and longstanding divide in visions of the international arena. Some assert that states are the most relevant actors in international politics, and others emphasise the importance of non-state actors as vehicles through which shared ideas and identities are enacted. Typically, cross-national scholarship adopts one of these…

In this paper, it is aimed to analyze the acquirements and topics in Turkish secondary school history textbooks that are published by the Ministry of National Education (MEB) and by the private sector to determine to what extend the place given to history of science and history of medicine. In the study, the document and content analysis…

The present study was designed to explore the role of Rebousi et al's primary 6th grade history school book in evaluating the experience of a nation but also to examine the causes behind the reactions of political parties, historians and the wider public. History books and politics have very deep roots that reflect on old responsibilities,…

Over the past 2 decades, textbook publishers have made large improvements by including multicultural education within their texts. U.S. history textbooks have specifically included diverse perspectives. The increased inclusion of diverse perspectives creates a more historically accurate depiction of how various cultures have contributed to the…

Features of eighth-grade history textbooks were examined through replication of a 20-year-old study that investigated "considerateness" of textbooks. Considerate texts provide clear, coherent information and include features that promote students' comprehension, such as explicit use of organizational structures, a range of question types…

The article discusses changes and revisions of the Norwegian official Grand Narrative, as portrayed in primary school history textbooks. The selected corpus of textbooks of 1885-1940 shows narrative and historiographical changes supporting a hypothesis of a development from a "Narrative of Suffering" towards a "Narrative of…

The main aim of this study is to offer a comparative analysis of historical narratives, with reference to the nexus between ideology, the state, and nation-building--as depicted in current history school textbooks in the Russian Federation (RF). This analysis of the core Russian history textbooks prescribed by the Ministry of Education and Science…

Although enrollments in secondary school Spanish have risen over the past few decades, the Spanish-speaking world (Latin America, in particular) tends to be underrepresented or absent in history textbooks. Given that not all students who take entry-level Spanish classes will continue to more advanced levels, the first-year Spanish textbook may be…

Despite its importance as the event establishing that the 20th century would be known as "the age of genocide," the destruction of the Armenians that occurred between the mid-1890s and 1923 is given marginal coverage in contemporary U. S. high school history textbooks. This article critiques that coverage and identifies the overall flow…

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…