ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years, scholars have researched how young people’s social identities have influenced their narrative constructions of their nation’s histories. Such constructions reflect not just their knowledge and beliefs about what or why things happened in the past; they also represent how young people’s perspectives on the past are connected to their knowledge, beliefs, and experiences in the present. Jörn Rüsen (1987) has described historical narration as “a basic mental procedure that makes sense of the past in order to orient practical life within time” (p. 284). By this definition, sense-making about the past occurs within the context of individual or group understandings of the present. Because many contemporary societies perpetuate inequitable power relations originating in the past among individuals and groups, the meaning and significance of the past varies, depending on individual or group purposes and/or perspectives.
