Introduction

Abstract

The connection between history instruction and the modern nation-state is an intimate one. The quintessential tools for instilling the lessons of the past in the minds of children are school textbooks, perhaps the most widely read and influential of any works of history. They are also amongst the most contested. This special feature focuses on the ways in which school textbooks in different regions of the world reflect and provide a site for conflicts over history and history education; it concludes with a short piece on how states and policymakers in the UK use (or fail to use) the ‘lessons of history’. Most western democracies have seen some version of the ‘history wars’ since the 1970s: the quest for recognition by under-represented and marginalized groups – women, aboriginal peoples, ethnic and religious minorities, immigrant communities, gays and lesbians – of their contributions to history and their calls for a restoration of their stories to ‘national’ narratives of the past. The global process of decolonization and the mass immigration from the Third World to Europe and the United States forced national curricula to confront the existence of competing and conflicting narratives of the past and the presence of strangers and outsiders within the national body. Inevitably these countries have also witnessed a conservative backlash, calling for the reassertion of a dominant national narrative. In Britain, for instance, the conservative reaction – emphasizing a singular national narrative and set of ‘values’, while whitewashing the colonial past – is evident in a recent textbook designed not for school children, but for immigrants taking the new test for British citizenship.1