Stéphanie Demers

An analysis of historical agency in Québec history textbooks

In the 1980s, in Québec history textbooks, authors presented history through linear, monocausal designs and attributed most social, political or economic changes favourable to democracy to unstable external causes or to stable external causes. They seldom attributed the evolution of democracy to ‘unstable internal causes’. These textbooks presented citizens as having almost no active role in socio-historical changes. This invited students to analyse past controversial social issues from a fatalistic perspective or through subjective moral criteria, while reinforcing the assumption that people from the past had bad ideas that good people have fortunately refuted since. Québec history programmes were reformed, in the 2000s, for middle and high schools. This article presents the results of a content analysis of the new history textbooks used in Québec, to see whether they still present such a deterministic and relativist perspective of social change. The preliminary results show that they do.

Veil: mirror of identity

been advisable to present the war in this part of Europe in a brief way. What for me is missing from this volume, however, is any attempt to recapitulate the failures and benefits of the postwar relocations. Contemporary observers, including a whole generation of eminent researchers of migratory phenomena (for example, Eugene Kulischer, Joseph Schechtman, and John Stoessinger) considered resettlements to be a necessary ‘surgical cut’ to secure peace. Today, we prefer to dwell on the failures of resettlement at that time. Studies by Chaim Kaufmann and others show clearly that the matter was far from simple in the context of Europe in 1945.