Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This introductory article presents the contributions to a thematic issue about the visual analysis of history textbooks and other educational media. It provides a brief historical overview of the use of pictures in history textbooks and discusses how developments in visual studies can help move the study of such pictures beyond questions of representation, toward considering the different ways in which they can exercise an agency of their own. It argues that we need to develop complex forms of visual literacy in interacting with textbooks and shows how the distinctions proposed by the issue authors can advance this task. The article ends by suggesting avenues for further research.

The use of history textbooks in order to instill particular images of the nation and national identity has been widely recognized, with a proliferation of studies focused on the problematic content in textbooks. Yet, history textbooks rely on a range of other media like maps, graphs, illustrated timelines, and photographs, which also play an important role in visually signposting the nation. While some of these images serve primarily as a form of representation aligned with the text itself, other aspects of visual content distinctly and autonomously construct national identity. In this piece, relying on qualitative visual analysis, we point to the function played by images in symbolically constructing the nation in contemporary primary school textbooks in five post-Yugoslav republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

In this article, we analyze and compare photographic images from some of the most widely circulated Japanese and American high school history textbooks regarding their treatment of the Pacific War. We focus on the visual component of war technology, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the visibility or invisibility of women, especially regarding the comfort women issue. We argue that images in the textbooks are articulated by a dialectic relationship between the visible and the invisible as a political question, thinking about the “off-screen space” as the structural principle of what we see. The textbooks’ visual memories about the Pacific War are not only influenced by what is shown but also by what is omitted and virtually depicted in the surrounding media.

This article focuses on war photography as a cultural phenomenon as used in secondary school history textbooks in the context of post-1989 Poland. It argues that the focus on the Second World War, its military aspects, and the threads previously erased from public memory, was specific to the Polish context. It also proves that the visuality of Polish textbooks after 1989 tends to correspond with the broader Western iconosphere as a result of political and cultural transformation. The mechanisms of visual communication underpinning these tendencies consist in several overlapping layers of experiencing and perceiving photography, such as studium, punctum (Roland Barthes), and spectrality (Michel de Certeau, Maciej Bugajewski). The article also postulates a visual literacy that holistically considers all of these aspects.

This article examines a school textbook, the Manual de Instrucción Primaria, which the Peruvian military created in the 1930s in order to help to redeem their indigenous recruits from their racialized backgrounds. On the one hand, the textbook echoed Peruvian elites’ anxieties about the suitability of their indigenous contingents to become part of the nation. On the other hand, the textbook recognized that indigenous people also had the capacity to contribute to Peru's modernization, especially when they supported the fight against illiteracy. What made this textbook different from others? That the publication was centered around recruits’ daily experience in the barracks. Both text and images may have allowed recruits to develop awareness about themselves and the country that they lived in.

This article is based on a bibliographical data set of over 2,600 history textbooks from the post-1945 Soviet Union and eleven out of its fifteen successor states, including books on international, national, and regional or local history. Among these, it analyzes the illustrations used in 450 books that cover the period of the Second World War. Arguing against a reduction of history-related visuals to a “narrative,” this article seeks to contribute to analyzing the visual grammar of history textbooks. It does so by drawing on notions of familiarity developed in French pragmatic sociology and identifies visual techniques used to make pupils approach war memorials in a mode of familiarity rather than critical analysis. Decontextualized presentations of monuments located outside the former Soviet Union turn them into timeless icons experienced via familiarity-as-recognition; monuments shown with surrounding landscapes or on maps turn them into intimately known markers of a Sovietized local identity.

This picture-type analysis of front covers of the German magazine Der Spiegel starts from the premise that the magazine's front covers convey history narratives that might play an important role in history education. Pupils can learn from them which history narratives dominate public discourse or cultural memory. The article provides a quantitative overview of the frequency with which Der Spiegel visually or verbally frames current political events in a historical context. Knowledge of this framing process can be used to teach how the media use history events to pursue “memory politics” or “politics for the past.” Some front covers, which refer to historical events, serve to legitimate or delegitimate current policies or politicians. Others show the extent to which Der Spiegel is involved in coming to terms with the National Socialist past.

The Holocaust was one of the most photographed genocides of the twentieth century. Since 1945, images from the liberation of the camps were used as shaming and shocking instruments of visual denazification. Many decades later, these icons are still used in educational contexts such as school textbooks, exhibitions, and documentaries and are presented almost exclusively as mere illustrations and not as independent sources. By approaching the image as a source, this contribution reflects on the different ways of looking at and seeing Holocaust photography. By moving from a purely emotional and illustrative approach to a more integrated visual approach, the complex dynamics underlying the Holocaust and the timeless mechanisms of totalitarianism (victimization, perpetration, and implication) can be better understood.