Elastic Textbooks: Pulling National Pasts Forward

Abstract

History textbooks have always been changing. From textual narratives in the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century’s books filled with images, source documents and tasks. Now, in our postdigital twenty-first century, textbooks are moving online as apps and websites. But what happens to the content as textbooks’ materiality changes? I suggest here that textbooks are “elastic”. Like an elastic band, they pull the national(ist) past, which was once the reason to institutionalise history education, with them. First, textbooks pull on the curriculum. Second, textbooks pull linearity with them. Third, textbooks pull on monovocality. The piece concludes by noting some augmentations which may reshape the elastic band of national(ist) history.