This dataset consists of the underlying data of the following scientific paper accepted for publication by the Journal of Social Science Education (http://www.jsse.org/): Piedade, Filipe; Ribeiro, Norberto; Loff, Manuel; Neves, Tiago & Menezes, Isabel (2018). Learning about the European Union in times of crisis: Portuguese textbooks’ normative visions of European citizenship. Journal of Social Science Education. This data has been collected from five Portuguese upper secondary education books, from the disciplines of History and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In particular, the files constituting this data set contain data that are specifically concerned with those Portuguese textbooks’ contents that are related with the European Union (partial data). These contents were analysed by members of the Portuguese research team and presented in the paper. Additional data is still under analysis by the Portuguese research team and will be made openly available in successive versions of the data set. This data is made available for open access in compliance with H2020 Program regulation, following the guidelines stipulated by the Data Management Plan adopted by the CATCH-EyoU research project.