Teaching About Home: Geography at Work in the Prewar Nagano Classroom

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the geography classroom as a crucible of nationalist ideology. In the past decade, scholars from around the world have exposed the chauvinism of national atlases (Black 1997; Fahlbusch, Rossler, and Siegrist 1989), assessed the citizenship models implicit in social-studies readers (Bailly 1998; Soysal 1998), traced the institutional linkages between geography and imperialism (Bell, Butlin, and Heffernan 1995; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Livingstone 1992), and explored the role of spatial images and metaphors in shaping national identities (Hooson 1994; Thongchai 1994).