In 2019, the Saudi Ministry of Education issued a series of changes to its educational curriculum. Consequently, Saudi textbooks now feature a new Saudi national history, one that highlights the country’s pre-Islamic past and adopts an anti-Ottoman stance to Ottoman history in the Arabian Peninsula. Many popular commentators explained this shift as “Turkophobia,” a symptom of a newly racialized Saudi nationalism, or political retribution after heightened Saudi-Turkey tensions following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Others point to ideological trends in the “new” Saudi Arabia, namely, its move away from religious nationalism, which necessitates sidelining its Islamic histories – both Wahhabī and Ottoman. In contrast, scholars of Saudi Arabia question the novelty of anti-Ottomanism and, instead, find its origins in Wahhabism or Sharifite Arab nationalism. Both popular and scholarly perspectives on anti-Ottomanism in Saudi Arabia do not sufficiently explain the current changes to Saudi textbooks. This paper will present two alternate arguments: first, it will show that the “new” Saudi national history relies on “old” narratives crafted and maintained locally for generations. These local narratives developed beyond the Saudi state and remained peripheral or absent from its national history. Furthermore, unlike the anti-Ottomanism in Hashemī Arab nationalism and Wahhabism, these local narratives reveal a more complex history of local-Ottoman encounters and contestations recorded in local social memory. To illustrate this, the paper will turn to local archives, memoirs, poetry collections, oral histories, and religious texts of one Najdī town: al-Russ of the al-Qassim region. Historically located along a main trade route, al-Russ was often the first of its neighboring towns to face various political incursions over time. Notably, al-Russ’ early histories and collective memory narrate a city-centric communal identity that emphasizes al-Russ’ heroic encounters with the Ottoman campaign of 1817-1818, when Ibrahim Paşa reached al-Qassim on his path to al-Dar’iyyah to end the “first” Saudi state. Second, this paper will argue that the Ministry of Education’s decision to feature local anti-Ottomanism in Saudi textbooks is part of a larger historical revisionist project: the “Saudization” of local memory and city or regional historical plurality. Differing from previous Saudi national projects, this project relies equally on recovery as it does erasure. While this is most evident in the increase in regional heritage projects, this paper showcases that it is also apparent in the “new” national historical record, where the official recovery of “forgotten,” local histories occurs simultaneously with their “remembrance” as Saudi local phenomena.