Who belongs to the nation, and how are groups positioned within it? Who may exercise political authority, who may challenge authority, and when is violence legitimate? What does the state owe its citizens, and what do citizens owe their state? The public school textbook is a particularly powerful and extensive form of official government speech meant to shape fundamental beliefs, attitudes, identities, and behaviors of future citizens regarding these and many other questions. Given the opportunity to socialize young people over a period of up to 12 years, the content of such textbooks is regularly subject to political controversy, especially with regard to subjects related to politics and society. Indeed, a wide body of qualitative evidence has documented how certain states have strategically sought to change textbooks to promote narratives that serve their agenda. This project endeavors to build a cross-national and historical worldwide corpus of textbooks in political and social subjects (e.g., civics, social studies, history, religious & moral education) to study the official narratives states authorize for children over time and space using computational methods and deep country expertise. We have the following objectives: (1) validate and/or complement global datasets measuring political concepts regarding democracy and society that rely on expert-coder assessments; (2) describe how narratives vary across time and space, theorize and test major factors driving variation in content; and (3) examine the exposure to textbooks on beliefs, attitudes, identities, and behaviors of citizens using (a) correlational evidence, (b) exploiting evidence from exogenous changes in textbook exposure, and (c) seeking RCT collaborations with willing education ministries open to testing alternative narratives.