ABSTRACT . This article provides a textual analysis of the pedagogical discourse of history textbooks used in the education of Chilean students. In particular, I focus on how the impact of Salvador Allende’s socialist government (1970–1973) and the military coup that led to the Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) are constructed by and displayed in these texts. As a method of analysis, I apply the Systemic Functional Grammar theory to history textbooks used in the sixth and eighth grades. Two of the metafunctions proposed by Halliday – textual and interpersonal – are particularly relevant when combined with an appraisal analysis fundamentally based on the work of Martin because they provide a useful tool for interpreting and explaining the text from an ideological standpoint. The analysis reveals that the textbooks’ authors strive to sound objective, but instead offer a large number of explicit and implicit judgements throughout the text. They purport to present two antithetical political positions – that of Allende’s supporters and that of the supporters of the military coup – however, the texts do not actually offer two clear positions nor do they provide clear reasons for the events. Instead, the authors obscure content through grammatical and lexical choices – such as the use of ‘and’ as an expression of reason or cause; embedded mental and verbal projection (sixth grade only); the absence of logico-semantic relationship of elaboration; and modal adjuncts that signal judgement but not explanation. Appraisal analysis in conjunction with a more discrete grammatical analysis is useful for revealing the explicit, subjective choices made in constructing these supposedly objective texts. KEY WORDS : appraisal analysis, history textbooks, ideology, Systemic Functional Grammar, textual analysis, textual and interpersonal metafunctions By presenting an analysis of two Chilean history textbooks, I plan to show how these texts, which are used by at least 85 percent of Chilean public school ARTICLE 639 How contemporary history is presented in Chilean middle school textbooks TERESA OTEIZA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA , DAVIS Discourse & Society Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 14(5): 639–660 [0957-9265 (200309) 14:5; 639–660; 034845]