Mario Carretero

Brady Wagoner

Everardo Perez-Manjarrez

Long dismissed as the domain of hobbyists and obsessives, historical reenactment—the dramatization of past events using costumed actors and historical props—has only in recent years attracted serious attention from scholars. Drawing on examples from around the world, Historical Reenactment offers a fascinating, interdisciplinary exploration of this cultural phenomenon. With particular attention to reenactment’s social and pedagogical dimensions, it develops a robust definition of what the practice constitutes, considers what methodological approaches are most appropriate, and places it alongside museums and memorial sites as an object of analysis.

New Ways of Experiencing History

Historical Reenactment

Stefan Berger

Maria Grever

This volume comprises a broad interdisciplinary examination of the many different approaches by which contemporary scholars record our history. The editors provide a comprehensive overview through thirty-eight chapters divided into four parts: a) Historical Culture and Public Uses of History; b) The Appeal of the Nation in History Education of Postcolonial Societies; c) Reflections on History Learning and Teaching; d) Educational Resources: Curricula, Textbooks and New Media. This unique text integrates contributions of researchers from history, education, collective memory, museum studies, heritage, social and cognitive psychology, and other social sciences, stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue. Contributors come from various countries of Northern and Southern America, Europe and Asia, providing an international perspective that does justice to the complexity of this field of study. The Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education provides state-of-the-art research, focussing on how citizens and societies make sense of the past through different ways of representing it.

Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education

Mikel Asensio

María Rodríguez-Moneo

How is history represented? As just a record of the past, as a part of a present identity or as future goals? This book explores how historical contents and narratives are presented in school textbooks and other cultural productions (museums, monuments, etc) and also how they are understood by students, in the context of increasing globalization. In these contemporary conditions, the relation between history learning processes, in and out of school, and the construction of national identities presents an ever more important topic. It is being studied by looking at the appropriation of historical narratives, which are frequently based on the official history of a nation state. Most of the chapters in this volume are educational studies about how the learning of history takes place in school settings of different countries such as Canada, France, Germany, Latin America, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Covering such a broad sample of cultural and national contexts, they provide a rich reflection on history as a subject related to patriotism, cosmopolitanism, both or neither.

History Education and the Construction of National Identities

Memory construction and national identity are key issues in our societies, as well as it is patriotism. How can we nowadays believe and give sense to traditional narrations that explain the origins of nations and communities? How do these narrations function in a process of globalization? How should we remember the recent past? In the construction of collective memory, no doubt history taught at school plays a fundamental role, as childhood and adolescence are periods in which the identity seeds flourish vigorously. This book analyses how history is far more than pure historical contents given in a subject matter; it studies the situation of school history in different countries such as the former URSS, United States, Germany, Japan, Spain and Mexico, making sensible comparisons and achieving global conclusions. The empirical part is based on students interviews about school patriotic rituals, very close to the teaching of history, specifically carried out in Argentina but very similar to these rituals in other countries. The author analizes in which ways that historical knowledge is understood by students and its influence on the construction of patriotism. This book--aside from making a major contribution to the cultural psychology field--should be of direct interest and relevance to all people interested in the ways education succeeds in its variable functions. As a matter of fact, it is related to other IAP books as Contemporary Public Debates Over History Education (Nakou & Barca, 2010) and What Shall We Tell the Children? International Perspectives on School History Textbooks (Foster & Crawford, 2006).

Mario Carretero

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