History, like nation-building, is a construct. It can be used as part of the national agenda to build a nation. History textbooks then become an important and effective apparatus for creating a shared narrative for citizens. As a result, one cannot divorce history as a subject in national curriculum from national political agenda. In this paper, Zawiah Yahya examines the provisional, relative and plural perspectives in historical writings and calls for the pondering over the nation's collective memory in a critical and comparative way.