Framing the National Mind of Students: A Textbook Case of the Prussian Wars: Educational Historiographies and Narratives in Prussian, Danish, Austrian, and French History and Geography Textbooks, From the Prussian Wars Until the Interwar Period

In my history of education dissertation, I analyze and compare ways that the four developing nation-states of Prussia, Denmark, Austria, and France incorporated nation-state-building, engineering, and citizen-making efforts into their curriculum, educational historiography, and history and geography textbook narratives over time (more than 50 years) and in comparison with each other. With the purpose of being able to compare results within a frame of the nation-states' educationalizing of the making of their future national citizens, I have reconstructed how the four different, newly-created nation-states configured their national educational institutions and curricula during Europe's long 19th century. Then, within a methodological framework that incorporated discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and curriculum studies approaches, I also analyzed the educational historiographies and history and geography textbook narratives of each of the four nation-states in relation to how the "same" set of events – the period of the Prussian Wars – were framed and written about for each nation-state's own students (i.e., future citizens). The sources analyzed were those intended for the upper public compulsory school levels in the four nation-states from and through critical times in their histories of nation-state-building, engineering, and mass schooling – that is, from the Prussian Wars in the mid-1800s until the Interwar Period between the First and Second World Wars. These reconstructions, educational historiographies, and textbook narratives were then compared over the nation-state's own trajectory as well as across the trajectories of the other nation-states analyzed in this research project.
Ultimately, this dissertation is a large, historical, multi-case comparative work that makes visible the nation-states' different (and/or similar) ways of educationalizing the making of future national citizens. It thus also adds to needed research on international comparative studies of nationalism and education as well as provides a bigger picture of how what we learn depends on when and where we learn it.