Volume 4 winner of the Textbook of the Year Award 2021

The outstanding textbooks honoured with the German Textbook of the Year Award 2021 have been announced. The joint history textbook ‘Europe – Our History’ has been declared the winner in the ‘society’ category. The textbook is the result of close cooperation between the publishing houses Eduversum and Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, and between authors and experts from Germany and Poland.

‘This textbook, developed by Polish and German historians and educators to depict European history from the perspective of both countries constitutes a novel idea. Overall it is a new kind of book that is innovative yet also instructive, and which superbly fulfils the didactic and subject-specific requirements while also potentially being politically ground breaking’.

Jury chair, Professor Karl Heinrich Pohl from Christian Albrechts University Kiel

Press Release – Georg Eckert Institute →

“Europe – Our History” is a curriculum-based, competency-focused textbook series containing a diverse range of materials presented in a way easily accessible to students and seeking to encourage learners to engage with history through discovery and form their own judgements on the issues discussed. The process by which the books have come into being encompassed multiple stages and involved academics, educators and publishers from Germany and Poland; the result is a series of publications which put the most recent findings of historical and educational research into practice. The series’ key aim is to help learners develop an awareness of history based on reflection on past events and on one’s own established attitudes. Changes in perspective are an integral and constitutive part of its structure, inspiring dialogue on differences in people’s experience of historical events and a better understanding of diversity.

The “Europe – Our History” series comprises four volumes. Volume 1, “From prehistory and ancient times to the Middle Ages”, has been available for use in German and Polish schools since 2016. Volume 2, “The modern period to 1815” was published 2017. Volume 3 “From the Congress of Vienna to World War I” followed in 2019, and Volume 4 “Twentieth Century to the Present” appeared in June 2020.