The Cold War in the Classroom: International Perspectives on Textbooks and Memory Practices [Hardcover]

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in todays history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is just history. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.

Chapter 1. Introduction; Barbara Christophe.- PART I. Textbook Memories.- Chapter 2. Textbook Memories of the Cold War: Introduction to Part I; Barbara Christophe.- Chapter 3. Manufacturing Coherence: How American textbooks incorporate diverse perspectives on the origins of the Cold War; Eva Fischer.- Chapter 4. Between radical shifts and Persistent Uncertainties: The Cold War in Russian history textbooks; Aleksandr Khodnev.- Chapter 5. The emergence of a multipolar world: Decentering the Cold War in Chinese history textbooks; Lisa Dyson.- Chapter 6. Americans and Russians as representatives of Us and Them. Contemporary Swedish school history textbooks and their portrayal of the central characters of the Cold War; Anders Persson.- Chapter 7. Images and Imaginings of the Cold War - with a focus on the Swiss view; Markus Furrer.- Chapter 8. Betwel£ç