The contribution this dissertation thus offers is to show how the rethinking of the truth of the past – in embodied terms – opens up potential new avenues for conceiving of historical truth and for teaching it in school-history.What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book.

Finally, the 5 features of school-history textbooks that I focus on in this work address issues of: 1) truth in the light of 2) competing accounts of history that 3) sharply distinguish fact from fiction moreover, in concentrating on: 4) narratives of the nation-state and 5) the arrangement of narrative in a linear sequence of static states, what is left out is the lived, experiential past of embodied persons of past times and places. The thesis investigates the use of metaphors in school-history textbooks and interview materials aiming to identify the metaphorical models, which shape ways of thinking about and engagement with the past. The research materials – Polish and Lithuanian school-history textbooks and interviews with their authors – serve as a “laboratory” for application and further development of these insights from cognitive science. There remains a lack of understanding of the practical implications of research on embodied cognition, which forms the gap this project aims to address. Even though evidence for the embodiment of mind abounds, the implications of this research have not yet entered the public consciousness.

My theoretical approach, enactive embodiment, posits a radically different understanding of cognition. I focus on visual metaphors, which structure the textbook presentation of the past, because such metaphors participate in conceptualizing cognition as making representations by a disembodied mind, distanced from the world. The embodied, conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson provides the framework for examining the metaphors that shape an understanding of both cognition and the past on a meta-theoretical level. For this task, I study the metaphorical models that shape textbook presentation of the past.

This research examines the conceptual roots for how the past – that is shared, but remembered differently – has been taught in school-history education in Poland and Lithuania. The tensions emerge in the divergent narratives, maintained by the two nations, of their shared past, in school-history education. A complex shared Polish-Lithuanian past raises historical as well as political controversy.

Gaddis the landscape of history