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For decades Northern Ireland was best known for the violent conflict referred to as the Troubles. However, the region is now amidst a massive transformation that hinges largely on the development of a tourism industry. The recent upsurge in foreign visitors means that tour guides become representatives of their society who must decide how (and how not) to portray Northern Ireland. At times, their representations clash with one another, and at others they coincide, but these frictions are key to identifying how tour guides take on the difficult responsibility of reimagining what the new Northern Ireland is or aspires to be. Based on an in-depth, ethnographic analysis of guided tours, I examine the role that local tour guides play in constructing and communicating new narratives about the heritage, identity, and potential future of Northern Ireland. This dissertation uncovers the complex nexus of considerations that tour guides make as they mediate between competing concerns and expectations of themselves, the tourists, and the society. In doing so, I show how tour guides and the narratives they construct for an outside audience contribute to more general processes of societal transition after conflict.

Kansteiner argues that the production of historical film and television programs and the writing of academic history represent two fundamentally different ways of appropriating the past. Academic history focuses on why questions and produces intellectually overdetermined and emotionally underdetermined texts. Historical film and TV pursue how questions (for instance, how did it feel like to live through WWII?) resulting in highly suggestive and immersive visual products. Consequently, film and TV are excellent classroom tools for the teaching of memory but not for the teaching of academic history. Kansteiner concludes with a look at cinema history to illustrate what types of memories can be successfully taught through the use of film.

Rosa and Bresco review the role of history teaching in a world where the idea of state sovereignty fades away and the notion of social pact—usually conceived to be bounded within national borders—is felt shaking. If history teaching aims at preparing students for active participation in multicultural societies within an increasingly globalised world, the role of nations as the prominent historical agents for understanding current affairs needs to be revised. What skills does this new scenario demand? History of what? History of and for whom? Drawing on these questions, the authors advocate a history teaching devoted to studying the transformation of social agents and Statehood, and concerned with the rights and empowerment of citizenship, rather than centred on national narratives of the expanding and shrinking size and power of each state.