Educational media research has known since its very beginnings that history textbooks play a key role in shaping depictions of past events and concepts of “friends” and “enemies.” This is particularly true when it comes to portrayals of war. As this book will show, civil and international wars often constitute turning points in a nation’s history, bringing forth heroes, iconic leaders, victory, defeat and, in their wake, dictatorships, new “friends” or “foes”, or sometimes a cultural tabula rasa. Due to their important role in national histories, depictions of wars in textbooks can be especially illustrative of the message that a particular authority wishes to convey to its younger citizens, particularly in educational media subject to government authorization. 1
However, not always and not everywhere have textbooks been the conveyors of an official view of history. Whereas the genre of national history textbooks appeared in the nineteenth century in the service of the emerging nation-states needing a unified tale of their past, at first textbooks tended to be less controlled by governments and more dependent on the will of publishers , authors , and diverse national and international variables. Later, during the interwar period, a number of international governmental and non-governmental efforts were conducted in Europe to design textbooks that represented friendlier views of past conflicts between nations. In the twentieth century, the writing of history textbooks was informed by a difficult relationship with academic historiography , further exacerbated by the demands of certain political regimes, with varied degrees of independence from those realms. Nowadays textbooks have a different status in classrooms throughout the world; they are vested with a manifold sociocultural significance and are subject to contrasting processes of production and selection. All these diverse factors have affected the ways in which past wars and conflicts have been represented in textbooks and the manner in which these representations have changed over time. This book aims to reflect precisely on the complexity of such representations from a historical and multinational perspective. Most chapters address the portrayals of different wars in textbooks from different parts of the world, examining the specific national and sociopolitical context; some chapters also examine the ways in which war and conflict have affected how textbooks are produced. Some chapters analyze the treatment of one war in binational contexts (Mexico–USA, China –Japan , Vietnam–USA), whereas others examine one civil war within one country in particular. Some focus on textbooks of a particular point in time; others examine the evolution of textbooks over several decades. The resulting compilation provides a colorful picture of the varied and changing roles that wars and conflicts have played in the stories of nations condensed within textbooks.
In the following we provide an overview of recent research on the topic of wars and textbooks, both in terms of present and historical textbook analysis. Then we describe the contents of this book and discuss the ways in which it contributes to the field of comparative textbook research.
1 Wars and Textbooks: An Overview
The portrayal of wars in textbooks has been the focus of both textbook-specific studies and works in which textbooks are analyzed among various sources referred to in the so-called “history wars” (Liakos 2008); that is, politicized controversies in the public representation of the past of a given society. Most of the literature tends to focus on a few specific conflicts, such as the two World Wars , the Middle East conflict, Greco-Turkish troubled historical relations, the wars between Japan , China and Korea , the Balkan wars, and the Cold War . Whereas the majority of studies refer to textbooks in the present or in the recent past, a few have also examined the topic in textbooks from different historical periods.
An overview of recent history textbook controversies in East Asia, in which the representation of past wars plays a distinctive role, is the compilation Designing History in East Asian Textbooks: Identity Politics and Transnational Aspirations (Müller 2011), which includes studies from China, Japan , Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Of all the issues on history textbooks in that region, the controversy over Japanese state-approved school textbooks that ran from 1982 to 2001 has been one of those most debated. At the heart of the controversy was the marginalization of Japan’s war crimes and colonial invasions during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War (1931–1945) in these textbooks, which further exacerbated tensions between Japan and its neighbors China and Korea , regions Japan had formerly occupied. Among the numerous writings on this textbook controversy, Yoshiko Nozaki’s book (2008) deserves particular attention. She examines the textbook controversy of the 1980s and 1990s, referring to the disputed official narratives on the war since 1945, and at the same time discusses the legal action taken by the author Ienaga Saburo, whose history textbook was censored. Nozaki demonstrates the difficulties surrounding the revision of textbook depictions of the war and the resistance it provokes, as well as the significance of interpretations of conflict for national constructions of identity. Other studies have taken a multinational approach toward recent textbooks in several countries of the region. The volume edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider, History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia (2011), shows how the “divided memories ” continuously taught about the Pacific War continue to permeate the memory cultures of Korea , Japan and China . With an agenda of reconciliation , the editors advocate common master narratives and seek to establish a selective historical memory in those three countries. Referring to the Franco-German case, Shin summarizes:
Previous experiences have taught us that successful reconciliation via history education requires a particular political environment, one that is lacking in Northeast Asia today. It would thus be more fruitful to recognize and understand how each society has developed its own distinctive memory of the past and how that memory has affected its national identity and relations with others’. (Shin 2011, 4)
In a similar reconciliatory vein, the book edited by Michael Lewis, “History Wars” and Reconciliation in Japan and Korea (2016), in which textbooks are among many aspects considered, refers to the civil society movements that oppose conservative historical revisionist turns promoted by governments.
Two volumes of the Georg Eckert Institute’s former 2 series Studies in International Textbook Research (Studien zur internationalen Schulbuchforschung) comprehensively investigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using a bilateral approach. Ruth Firer and Sami Adwan (2004) published the findings of their long-term research on Israeli and Palestinian social studies and history textbooks, in which they made detailed reference to the specific national differences in the respective education systems and in the conditions dictating the production and use of textbooks. Second, a volume edited by Falk Pingel (2003) addresses Palestinian and Israeli curricula and investigates the implementation of curricula in the classroom. Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s (2012) detailed observations of the image of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks and the associated anti-Palestinian propaganda follow in a similar vein. Adwan et al. (2016) have further examined the struggle over narratives of the conflict in recent Israeli and Palestinian textbooks; while these textbooks do not typically demonize “the other,” the historical narratives of each side remain mutually contradictory, which suggests that young people in these countries are socialized toward the continuation of conflict rather than mutual acceptance and peace.
The role history textbooks play in Greco-Turkish tensions has also been investigated in some depth. Bilateral studies of textbooks from both countries (Millas 1991; Hirschon 2016) have shown how the representation of conflicts and wars over centuries serves to reinforce myths of national identities with a defensive attitude against “the other.” Furthermore, studies on Cypriot history textbooks (Papadakis 2008; Vural and Özuyanık 2008; Samani and Ayhan 2017) also examine the contrasting narratives of Turkish and Greek-Cypriot textbooks on foundational episodes of the island’s history such as the Ottoman conquest in 1571 and the war around the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (1963–1974).
The portrayal of the two world wars in textbooks has been subject to several studies, the first receiving comparatively less attention than the second. Two works stand out as compilations of representations of the First World War in history textbooks from various countries in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe: a special issue of Historiens et Geographes (Tison 2000) and another of Internationale Schulbuchforschung: Zeitschrift des Georg-Eckert-Instituts für Internationale Schulbuchforschung (Bendick and Riemenschneider 2000). The representation of the First World War in recent textbooks of fifteen African countries has been studied by Bentrovato (2015). Particularly innovative in her study is the finding that portrayals of the war include efforts to reclaim and re-center local historical agency, experiences, and views. From a didactic perspective, in Schulbuch und Erster Weltkrieg, Christophe and Schwedes (2015) analyze how a number of history textbooks from Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and England over the past four decades treat the subject of the First World War. They examine the extent to which textbooks address the perspectival nature of the perception of events, their relationship to the present, and render explicit the position of the historian.
The treatment of the Second World War in textbooks has also been the subject of a number of comparative, multinational studies. Nicholls (2006) compared the representation of WWII in a sample of secondary -school textbooks from England, Japan, Sweden, Italy , and the United States. Nicholls considers not only how the perspectives on the war adopted by the textbooks relate to the political agendas of their countries but also how students engage with the textbooks, concluding that, in general, students are not encouraged to critically and meaningfully engage with a variety of perspectives on the war. The study by Keith Crawford and Stuart Foster War, Nation, Memory (2007), a key volume for any analysis of the Second World War in contemporary history textbooks, also provides a...