Images of the Early Cold War in Current US Memory Politics (Cases of Call of Duty Game Series and School Textbooks)

The presented research based on a comparison of the content of video games and school history textbooks is devoted to the study of the semantic content of images of the Early Cold War in the current policy of memory in the United States. The empirical basis of the study is the Call of Duty game series and US history textbooks from three American publishers leading in the educational literature segment. These textbooks were used in high and middle grades in American schools throughout the 2000s–20s. The keys methods are discourse analysis and case studies. As the result of the research, the US memory policy allows for the existence within the memorial narrative of school textbooks of three variants of the early Cold War, created within the framework of the traditionalist, revisionist and post-revisionist approaches. Most often, these are presented simultaneously in textbooks. But traditionalist and post-revisionist approaches prevail in the narrative due to their complementarity for the US and relevance to the task of forming memorial conformity in order to ensure the sustainability of national-state identity and legitimize existing models of socio-economic and political structure. Within the Call of Duty game series, developers used almost exclusively traditionalist approach. Among a formal variety of positioning models the revisionist concept is largely marginalized, as well as the post-revisionist concept (that also assumes the moral superiority of the US in the confrontation with the USSR), that probably contributes to choose the traditionalist approach. Also, the choice of the traditionalist approach involves forming memorial conformism on a complementary basis.