The Holocaust was one of the most photographed genocides of the twentieth century. Since 1945, images from the liberation of the camps were used as shaming and shocking instruments of visual denazification. Many decades later, these icons are still used in educational contexts such as school textbooks, exhibitions, and documentaries and are…

This article examines a school textbook, the "Manual de Instrucción Primaria," which the Peruvian military created in the 1930s in order to help to redeem their indigenous recruits from their racialized backgrounds. On the one hand, the textbook echoed Peruvian elites' anxieties about the suitability of their indigenous contingents to…

In this article, we analyze and compare photographic images from some of the most widely circulated Japanese and American high school history textbooks regarding their treatment of the Pacific War. We focus on the visual component of war technology, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the visibility or invisibility of women,…

This article focuses on war photography as a cultural phenomenon as used in secondary school history textbooks in the context of post-1989 Poland. It argues that the focus on the Second World War, its military aspects, and the threads previously erased from public memory, was specific to the Polish context. It also proves that the visuality of…

The use of history textbooks in order to instill particular images of the nation and national identity has been widely recognized, with a proliferation of studies focused on the problematic content in textbooks. Yet, history textbooks rely on a range of other media like maps, graphs, illustrated timelines, and photographs, which also play an…

This article is based on a bibliographical data set of over 2,600 history textbooks from the post-1945 Soviet Union and eleven out of its fifteen successor states, including books on international, national, and regional or local history. Among these, it analyzes the illustrations used in 450 books that cover the period of the Second World War.…

This picture-type analysis of front covers of the German magazine "Der Spiegel" starts from the premise that the magazine's front covers convey history narratives that might play an important role in history education. Pupils can learn from them which history narratives dominate public discourse or cultural memory. The article provides a…

This article recounts the history of the Ohio School of the Air (OSA) as a technological innovation that demonstrates the promise and limitations of technology in education. The article situates the OSA within the larger progressive educational movement, detailing the OSA's rise and reasons for its decline. This article argues that, while the OSA…

Building on previous research concerning the archaeological narratives of Greek history textbooks, this study investigates the impact of these studies on schoolchildren's historical ideas. In the context of these narratives, the article addresses two significant landmarks of Greek antiquity, namely the Mycenaean civilization and the Acropolis of…

This article explores the historical narrative developed by the two most popular Christian school publishers (A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press) at their founding in the mid-1970s. Specifically, they promoted the idea that it was exclusively white Anglo-American men who heroically created the United States by separating order from chaos.…

History textbooks play a critical role in their connection to conflict. While they can play a role in dehumanizing the "other" by propagating the myths and narratives of dominant groups, they can also play a transformational role in challenging discourses and narratives at the root of conflict. This article explores the relationship…

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the way the Holocaust is taught in pre-university education in Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. It analyses the context in which references to the Holocaust occur in curricula and examines different approaches adopted by teachers based on data collected in a survey. The research reveals that…

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States, people immediately compared the attack with the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor sixty years prior. In this article, we explore how US and world history textbooks published shortly after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 depicted and contextualized both events. The textbooks…

This article analyzes a current exhibition, "Climate for Change," which opened at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in 2019. By engaging with the way in which the exhibition constructs a "we," the article proceeds to examine how agency for mitigation is presented and analyzed. It assesses how futures are created and what types of…

The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) remains one of the world's most visited museums precisely because it embodies the "romance of technological progress." From its origins in the US National Museum of the early twentieth century to the opening of its first dedicated building in 1976 and beyond, visitors…