Although ’historical thinking’ has become one of the important aims in the history curriculum in Taiwan, little research has concerned about the related issues such as definition, textbooks, students’ ideas and the practical teaching. The study aims to explore the issue of teaching and learning historical empathy in senior high schools. The first year of the study focuses examining the concept of ’historical empathy’ and analyzing how this concept is portrayed in history textbooks for senior high school, especially on how textbook authors explain people’s actions in the past. This study was conducted by textbook content analysis, and four different Taiwanese history textbooks for senior high school were examined. The world modern history was chosen as the topic. The results showed that all four textbook content focused more on the basic historical facts than the casual links of historical events or the reasons behind people’s actions. A few examples of historical explanations were detected, and they were categorized into three styles: (a) the authors used longer sentences to explain people’s actions in the past, but still presented it as one single explanation without sources； (b) the authors tried to use historical sources to support their single explanation (3) the authors offered different explanations of people’s actions in the past, but from the same point of view.
