Teaching Democracy, Teaching War: American and Japanese Educators Teach the Pacific War

National narrative, master narrative, textbook narrative, counternarrative, multiple narratives-the language, though not the ideas behind it, was new to me and to most if not all the high school and college teachers in the audience when our keynote speaker at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute in 1994 challenged us to “problematize the national, the master, the textbook narrative … to make history messy!” ¹