Reflection of National Components on the Content of History Textbooks in the Second Pahlavi Era: Application of Ruth Wodak’s Theory of Historical Discourse Analysis

The establishment of the modern state in contemporary Iran brought about a fundamental change in the traditional education. The special function of the educational institution in its modern form is to reproduce and institutionalize the ideology of politics. Emphasis on the ancient history of Iran and the central role of the emperor in the Iranian political system during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi has been formulated as an external manifestation of nationalism in various studies, but the intentional injection of this ideology into the content of history textbooks has not been studied by any researcher. In the present study, from this perspective, attention has been paid to how national components are reflected in textbooks through linguistic analysis. The technique used in the linguistic analysis of the content of history textbooks in the second Pahlavi period in this research is derived from the research of Ruth Wodak (2015) in this field. She pays attention to 5 different levels of language formation stages for the formulation of scientific propositions. Therefore, this study, in the dialectic between history and ideology and power, seeks to investigate the strategies of political institutions (second Pahlavi era) in creating the text, interpretation, and the selection of historical propositions by examining the content of history textbooks according to Ruth Wodak’s approach of historical discourse analysis.