Eugenia Roldán Vera

Eckhardt Fuchs

This volume reflects on the role played by textbooks in the complex relationship between war and education from a historical and multinational perspective, asking how textbook content and production can play a part in these processes. It has long been established that history textbooks play a key role in shaping the next generation’s understanding of both past events and the concept of ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. Considering both current and historical textbooks, often through a bi-national comparative approach, the editors and contributors investigate various important aspects of the relationships between textbooks and war, including the role wars play in the creation of national identities (whether the country is on the winning or losing side), the effacement of international wars to highlight a country’s exceptionalism, or the obscuring of intra-national conflict through the ways in which a civil war is portrayed. This pioneering book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of textbooks, educational media and the relationships between curricula and war.

Historical and Multinational Perspectives

Textbooks and War

The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence is a pioneering study of the export of books from Britain to early-independent Spanish America, which considers all phases of production, distribution, reading, and re-writing of British books in the region, and explores the role that these works played in the formation of national identities in the new countries. Analysing in particular the publishing house of Rudolph Ackermann, which dominated the export of British books in Spanish to the former colonies in the 1820s, it discusses the ways in which the printed form of these publications affected the knowledge conveyed by them. After a survey of the peculiar characteristics of print culture in early-independent Spanish America and the trends in the import of European books in the region, the author examines the operation of Ackermann's publishing enterprise. She shows how the collaborative nature of this enterprise, involving a number of Spanish American diplomats as sponsors and Spanish exiles as writers and translators, shaped the characteristics of its publications, and how the notion of 'useful knowledge' conveyed by them was deployed in the service of both commercial and educational concerns. The hitherto unexplored mechanisms of book import, distribution, wholesale and retailing in Spanish America in the 1820s are also analysed as is the way in which the significance of the knowledge transmitted by those books shifted in the course of their production and distribution. The author examines how the question-and-answer form of Ackermann's textbooks constrained both publishers and writers and oriented their readers' relation with the texts. She then looks at the various ways in which foreign knowledge was appropriated in the construction of individual, social, national, and continental identities; this is done through the study of a number of individual reading experiences and through the analysis of the editions and adaptations of Ackermann's textbooks during the nineteenth century.

Eugenia Roldán Vera

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