As a result of developments in public education in the nineteenth-century Ottoman state, pedagogic professionalism began to direct school studies by setting scientific discourse against conventional epistemology. However, the strong conviction that the late Ottoman Empire was secularised progressively over years leads to the neglect of the tensions and conflicts in active authorship, and nullifies the role of textbooks as battlefields for ideologies. This article examines the tensions and resistances to modern knowledge that were deemed to be transferred in a smooth transition from the old to the new epistemology, in the history of education literature. The article discusses the discursive views in the general history textbooks. The contrasting conceptions of history, the first man, civilisations and tribal societies demonstrate the failure to form standard school knowledge in the Second Constitutional Period.