ABSTRACT
National education institutions, curricula, educational historiography, and tools like textbooks play a large role in nation-state-building and the making of nation-states’ future citizens. In relation to this, there is also a historical link between the development of national compulsory, mass schooling, and nation-oriented school subjects such as history and geography. Therefore, in an effort to reconstruct Denmark’s historical path of nation-state development from constitutionalism to the Nordic model, this chapter focuses on the analysis of official narratives from history and geography textbooks published for Denmark between 1849 and 1939. In analyzing these textbook narratives, certain, persistent ideals of the Danish nation-state engineers reveal themselves. What emerges in this case is twofold. On the one hand, the Danish national movement and the importance it placed on Danish unification as a Folk through the Danish language relate to both the historic, nationally pertinent Schleswig Question and Denmark’s transition to a constitutional monarchy at the end of the 1840s. On the other hand, their resulting emphasis on unity and populism helped Denmark develop values that would converge well with the other Nordic states in the Nordic model nearly a century later.
