The purpose with this paper is to study how the distribution of pictures has changed in textbooks of history for upper secondary school. This study has a quantitative approach. Textbooks from the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s have been studied, and the pictures have been divided into different categories and after that compared between the different decades. The study shows that older history has become less interesting for textbooks, and new history has become more interesting, and the important events that have been documented take more and more space in the books. Also pictures with artistic characters have become a very big part of the illustrations in the books. You can also se that the interest in persons with a high position in society has increased, and that almost every one of these people is men. The interest in women and how common pepoles live has becom less interesting, and illustrations with explaining characters have been going up and down in their develpoment during these centuries. To sum up you can say that new history with powerful men has become more and more important in history textbooks of upper secondary school. What here is meant with new history is the time from the end of the Middle Ages and forward, with speciel focus on the 19th century and the 20th century.