Surveying the historical landscape: the evaluative voice of history textbooks

Abstract

Abstract Much attention has been devoted to understanding the rhetorical features of history texts and how they position readers to take up particular views toward the past. One useful taxonomy for investigating evaluative meaning from the systemic-functional tradition is the Appraisal framework. Voice Theory extends this framework to account for the particular combinations of Appraisal resources that tend to occur in different genres and at specific stages within them, showing how authors take up various evaluative postures or ‘voices’ when communicating with their audiences. The Voices of History framework identifies a variety of such voices including Recorder and Interpreter that describe the particular configurations of Appraisal found in different history genres. Recent research, however, has shown that the types of Appraisal resources that commonly occur in history textbooks do not fit neatly with the existing Voices of History framework—a set of resources that was initially developed to describe the voices of written school history genres. This paper elaborates the Voices of History framework by proposing a new voice called Surveyor Voice to account for the types of Appraisal commonly deployed in history textbooks. It also discusses the modified framework in the context of broader disciplinary issues in historiography, including the underlying epistemological principles of historical knowledge construction.

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