HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
The impetus for this research was to analyze how history textbooks in the selected countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Italy, Serbia, and Slovenia – dealt with the most difficult aspects of 20th century history, particularly in the descriptions of conflict, ethnic minorities, and border issues. All of the countries have a long history of entangled pasts and periods of cooperation, but also episodes of war, violent border changes, ethnic cleansing, and dictatorships. Textbooks and educational strategies play an important role in constructing collective memory as well as images of the “Other” (whether ethnic minorities or neighboring peoples), so the project leadership decided to focus on this aspect in order to identify the best practices and develop recommendations for the future of cooperation, tolerance, and understanding in the region. Considerable research has already been done on textbooks and collective memory, and we understand that this is only a small part of the overall cultural memory practices in these countries.
Nevertheless, the Scientific Committee gathered a number of experts who have worked on this topic and are leading scholars in the field to provide EUFREE with snapshots of regional textbook practices as a starting point for the other activities in the project: