… Germany, and the United States
"This essay is drawn from a book I co-edited with Mark Selden that examines and compares controversies over textbook depictions of recent wars in Japan, Germany, and the United States, called Censoring History, just out from M.E. Sharpe. The content of Japanese textbooks is perennially controversial, but there is little direct comparison to textbooks in other places, so we wanted to look at this issue comparatively. We asked: what can we learn about nationalism, citizenship, and history, through attention to debates over textbooks, and specifically about debates on textbook coverage of WWII?
Schools and textbooks are one of the important ways that contemporary societies transmit ideas of citizenship, and both the idealized past and the promised future of the community. They tell us who is part of the important shared story and who isn't -- and which aspects of their life experiences are central to the national experience and which are not. Textbooks in most societies present an "official" story, highlighting narratives that shape contemporary patriotism.
We focus on two inter-related themes of nationalism that run through history lessons everywhere:…"
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