Abstract
This article examines the ways in which the authors of a text set of children’s literature constructed the United States government’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Analysis of this text set reveals the ways agency is mostly absent, displaced, or obscured through the grammatical devices of nominalization and passivization. Nominalization refers to an author’s use of verbs as nouns, and passivization refers to an author’s use of passive verbs without the presence of agents. To support teachers and students toward investigations of how authors use nominalization and passivization to construct historical events in different ways, five guiding questions about agency are presented. Grappling with these kinds of questions can engender critical reading practices of which readers can more actively enact their own agency as readers of history and as citizens in a democracy.
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