Narrating the Second World War

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-57
Author(s):  
Lina Klymenko
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
School History ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Second World

This article explores the theoretical understanding of the relation between school history textbooks and the state-led construction of national identity. It does this by conceptualizing a history textbook as an assembly of historical narratives that provide young readers with an opportunity to identify with the national community in which they live. By focusing on narrative techniques, including plot, concepts of time and space, and the categorization of characters as in- and out-groups, this article shows how narratives of the Second World War in Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian textbooks contribute to nation-building.

History Textbooks in Twentieth Century Japan

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
Chinichi Arai
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
World War ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
National Education ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

Despite modernization of the Japanese school system after 1872, this period was marked by the war in East Asia and nationalism focusing on the emperor, whereby the imperial rescript of 1890 defined the core of national education. Following defeat in the Second World War, Japan reformed its education system in accordance with a policy geared towards peace and democracy in line with the United Nations. However, following the peace treaty of 1951 and renewed economic development during the Cold War, the conservative power bloc revised history textbooks in accordance with nationalist ideology. Many teachers, historians and trade unions resisted this tendency, and in 1982 neighboring countries in East Asia protested against the Japanese government for justifying past aggression in history textbooks. As a result, descriptions of wartime misdeeds committed by the Japanese army found their way into textbooks after 1997. Although the ethnocentric history textbook for Japanese secondary schools was published and passed government screening in 2001, there is now a trend towards bilateral or multilateral teaching materials between Japan, South Korea, and China. Two bilateral and one multilateral work have been published so far, which constitute the basis for future trials toward publishing a common textbook.

Are Students Expected to Critically Engage with Textbook Perspectives of the Second World War? A Comparative and International Study

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
International Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
World War ◽  
School History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World ◽  
Contemporary School

This article is a comparative study of perspectives of the Second World War in contemporary school history textbooks from England, Japan, Sweden, Italy and the United States. In the article the author examines the extent to which interpretations of the Second World War differ in the textbooks of each nation as well as the relationship between perspectives and contemporary political agendas. Research on developments in Germany is used as an anchor against which to compare developments in the five countries. Having described and analysed differences the author then investigates the extent to which students in the five countries may be expected to engage with perspectives offered. To construct alternative interpretations of the conflict the author supports an interpretative understanding of the discipline of history based in a neo-hermeneutic reading of the subject.

scholarly journals Forgotten Images and the Geopolitics of Memory: The Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Caterina Albano
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Second World

The Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–6) had a profoundly destabilising effect internationally and can be regarded as one of the events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Benito Mussolini's occupation of the country (then known as Abyssinia) was facilitated by the massive use of air power and chemical weapons – in ways that at the time were still unprecedented. Mussolini's chemical war, occurring in a country at the periphery of geopolitical spheres of interest, has remained marginal to established historical narratives, rendering it anachronistically topical to today's politics of memory. By examining two films based on archival film footage, respectively Lutz Becker's documentary The Lion of Judah, War in Ethiopia 1935–1936 (1975) and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's video work Barbaric Land ( Paese barbaro, 2013), this article considers the significance of the moving image as a trace of events that have mostly remained visually undocumented and questions its relevance vis à vis today's mediated warfare and the ethics of images.

scholarly journals Animating the subjugated past: digital greeting cards as a form of counter-memory

2019 ◽  
pp. 147035721989063
Author(s):  
Mykola Makhortykh ◽  
Maryna Sydorova
Keyword(s):  
Potential Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Greeting Cards ◽  
Memory Practices ◽  
Second World

This article discusses how popular culture products – digital greeting cards – interact with hegemonic historical narratives in the context of war remembrance. It employs the Foucauldian concept of counter-memory to analyse how user-generated mnemonic content interacts with historical power relations. Using content analysis to examine a sample of amateur greeting cards, the authors investigate how these cultural products engage with official and counter-official memory practices in Russia related to the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Specifically, the article explores how different visual elements are employed to (de)construct specific narratives about the Soviet victory and it discusses how the use of computer graphics, in particular animation, influences the potential role of greeting cards as a means of resurrecting the subjugated past.

A Study of Bias in British and American History Textbooks

1965 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 31-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Mowat
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
World War ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World

The examination of historical works, and especially school textbooks on history, for evidence of national bias, is nothing new. Between the wars the focus was on British and German histories, which were an object of concern to the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. Since the Second World War the subject of national bias in historical works has been taken up by the Council of Europe and UNESCO. A recent study has been concerned with current British and American textbooks, which have been examined for evidences of bias against the United States and Britain respectively.

scholarly journals British History is Their History: Britain and the British Empire in the History Curriculum of Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia 1930-1975

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Stephen J Jackson
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
British History ◽  
World War ◽  
History Curriculum ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World

This article investigates the evolving conceptions of national identity in Canada and Australia through an analysis of officially sanctioned history textbooks in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia. From the 1930s until the 1950s, Britain and the British Empire served a pivotal role in history textbooks and curricula in both territories. Textbooks generally held that British and imperial history were crucial to the Canadian and Australian national identity. Following the Second World War, textbooks in both Ontario and Victoria began to recognize Britain’s loss of power, and how this changed Australian and Canadian participation in the British Empire/Commonwealth. But rather than advocate for a complete withdrawal from engagement with Britain, authors emphasized the continuing importance of the example of the British Empire and Commonwealth to world affairs. In fact, participation in the Commonwealth was often described as of even more importance as the Dominions could take a more prominent place in imperial affairs. By the 1960s, however, textbook authors in Ontario and Victoria began to change their narratives, de-emphasizing the importance of the British Empire to the Canadian and Australian identity. Crucially, by the late 1960s the new narratives Ontarians and Victorians constructed claimed that the British Empire and national identity were no longer significantly linked. An investigation into these narratives of history will provide a unique window into officially acceptable views on imperialism before and during the era of decolonization.

scholarly journals Views of an Iberian identity in the post-war world: Cultural heritage and politics as seen by Portuguese artists

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-766
Author(s):  
Leonor De Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
World Cultural Heritage ◽  
Post War ◽  
Artistic Heritage ◽  
Second World ◽  
Historical References

Portugal and Spain never shared such a distinctive place in recent European history than in the post-war period. Despite the end of the Second World War and the Nazi-fascist defeat, the Iberian dictators, Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain, managed to retain their power. This article analyses the creative and theoretical responses of Portuguese artists to the political situation in the Iberian Peninsula taking into particular consideration their approaches to an Iberian identity. It argues that Paula Rego, Barto dos Santos and Ana Hatherly carried out a reinterpretation of cultural and artistic heritage, iconographic memories and historical narratives and, as a result, formulated alternative views of the past and the present that opposed the Iberian dictatorships’ discourses of a glorious, imperialistic legacy that legitimated their ruling. By proposing to look at the references to Spain in Portuguese artists’ work, this article evidences how Portuguese artists sympathized with the political troubles also endured by the Spanish people and singles out a perception of shared cultural traditions between Spain and Portugal. Finally, this article also emphasizes experimental practices and a deliberate eclectic appropriation and reconfiguration of contemporary or historical references that ultimately shaped attitudes of political resistance.

From Silence to Recognition

2007 ◽  
pp. 305-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Szuchta
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Educational System ◽  
School System ◽  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
World War ◽  
National History ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Second World

MORE than three and a half million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War, constituting the country’s second largest minority. Most of them did not survive the Holocaust. After the war and throughout the communist period, students in Polish schools seldom explored Poland’s multi-ethnic traditions in the past and the destruction of the Jewish community in the years 1939–45. The Polish educational system promptly subsumed the Jewish victims of the Holocaust under the total number of six million Polish citizens killed during the war. In history lessons the Holocaust was treated as a peripheral phenomenon, often depicted as a part of the struggle and martyrology of the Polish nation. The authors of history textbooks discussed the fate of the Jews only within the framework of Polish national history. Chapter headings stressed the Polish ethnic character of the wartime struggle and suffering: ‘Polish National Struggle for Freedom’; ‘Poles Fight to Regain their Freedom’; ‘Polish Nation Resisted the Occupier’; ‘Polish Struggle for Freedom in 1939–1944’; ‘Nazi Extermination Policy towards the Polish Nation’; ‘Polish Lands during the Second World War’; and ‘The Situation of the Polish Nation after the Loss of Independence’. For several generations of graduates of the Polish school system, this contextualization impaired understanding of the fate of the Jews during the war—both Polish citizens and Jews from other countries who were deported to Nazi-occupied Poland and murdered in death camps, ghettos, and concentration camps....

Epiphanic "The Third Wave Experience" - Ron Jones and students

2020 ◽  
Vol XI (1 (30)) ◽  
pp. 185-211
Author(s):  
Agata Marciniak
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
German Population ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
World War ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
The Third ◽  
School History ◽  
History Teacher ◽  
Second World ◽  
Experiment Analysis

The Third Wave Experience was an experiment created by California high school history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 to explain how the German population could accept the Nazi regime before the Second World War. The paper presents in detailes the course of this experiment, analysis and assessment of teacher's attitudes and activities as well as factors conditioning students involvement. Analyzes conducted in the paper indicate an epiphanic character of The Third Wave Experience.

The Image of Italian Colonialism in Italian History Textbooks for Secondary Schools

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Cajani
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Second World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Textbook Analysis ◽  
World War ◽  
Italian History ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Second World ◽  
Upper Secondary Schools

This article reconstructs the evolution of the representation of Italian colonialism in history textbooks for upper secondary schools from the Fascist era to the present day. Textbook analysis is conducted here in parallel with the development of Italian historiography, with special attention being paid to the myth of the "good Italian", incapable of war crimes and violence against civilians, that has been cherished by Italian public opinion for a long time. Italian historians have thoroughly reconstructed the crimes perpetrated by the Italian army both in the colonies and in Yugoslavia and Greece during the Second World War, and this issue has slowly entered history textbooks.

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