Colonial History through Textbooks: Projects from Peru and Spain from across the 20th Century

This paper emerges from an anthropology of the transmission of history. In it, I evaluate the rhetoric in government-sanctioned high school history textbooks from Peru and Spain, from across the 20th century, selected from significant periods of political transformation and extensive education reform. Specifically, I analyze those sections discussing the socioeconomic make up and consequences of the period of Spanish invasion and colonization of the Americas. This gives an entryway into the source discourses for extant understandings of the meanings of being “the colonizers” versus “the colonized,” while positing contemporary attachments to such roles as precipitates of political intervention across time. I present excerpts from history textbooks, chronologically, meant for students in the second or third year of high school (already an education ideology about when students should learn national history shared by curriculum developers in both nations). My central question is: how much can we determine about the importance of textbooks in the formation of historical consciousness? Some ethnographic data from contemporary field research is included to better address the stakes of the argument.