ABSTRACT
The 1920s and 30s was the era when the Baltic ethnic communities acquired an institutional form, that is the nation-states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were established. Ethnic identity became framed, standardised, and ready for transmission to future generations through public institutions, including schooling. We addressed the question of what tools the schools used to encode national belonging and to teach how to practice it on one object: the primer, the bedrock of national literacy. The 16 primers became the corpus of the present study. The research into primers revealed that the teaching of nationhood started with the “flaggings” of ethnicity, consisting of iconographic landscapes and personified natural images of the homeland; folklore as the basis for learning the mother tongue; and the ritualized routine of the rural community. Although there is much in common in the portrayals of Latvians and Lithuanians in the primers, our research reveals a significant difference—Lithuanians emphasize their national identity belonging to Lithuania and Lithuania’s belonging to them more strongly and more tangibly than Latvians.
