DECEMBER 1, 1918 IN TEXTBOOKS OF HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY FROM THE INTERWAR PERIOD
DECEMBER 1, 1918 IN TEXTBOOKS OF HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY FROM THE INTERWAR PERIOD

Summary/Abstract: In my article I discuss the role of the textbooks in shaping the historical consciousnessof the pupils in the Romanian school system during interwar years. I concentrate on the way in which,by means of school curricula December 1, 1918 was imposed as a lieux de mémoire in theconsciousness of the future Romanian state citizens. Although, I elaborate mostly on selected textbooksused during the interwar time, I go beyond these chronological confines and refer to the textbooksduring communist era and to those published during post-communist. My choice is motivated by theawareness that schoo textbooks were/are often used as political tools in building a national cleansedand official historical narrative. Implicitly, regime change brings mutations or at least variables whenan historical event was/is interpreted, hence, revealing the influence of ideologies in shaping thereconstruction and the dissemination of the knowledges concerning the past of any national community.By crossing the interwar chronological borders, I would be able to highlight how authoritarianmanifestations of political power, notable in all regimes I will refer to, tend to privilege a monolithicinterpretation of the historical event(s). The simplest way to establish control was through thereplacement of a variety of didactic literature with a unique textbook. As I show, this tendency is notlinked, as generally expected, to the communist regime but has its antecedents

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