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By delving into the complex, cross-generational exchanges that characterize any political project as rampant as empire, this thought-provoking study focuses on children and their ambivalent, intimate relationships with maps and practices of mapping at the dawn of the “American Century.” Considering children as students, map and puzzle makers, letter writers, and playmates, Mahshid Mayar interrogates the ways turn-of-the-century American children encountered, made sense of, and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of the United States and the world. Mayar further probes how children’s diverse patterns of consuming, relating to, and appropriating the “truths” that maps represent turned cartography into a site of personal and political contention. To investigate where in the world the United States imagined itself at the end of the nineteenth century, this book calls for new modes of mapping the United States as it studies the nation on regional, hemispheric, and global scales. By examining the multilayered liaison between imperial pedagogy and geopolitical literacy across a wide range of archival evidence, Mayar delivers a careful microhistorical study of US empire.

This chapter analyzes the geographical puzzles that children sent to the juvenile periodical Harper’s Young People: An Illustrated Weekly during the 1890s. The chapter’s focus is on what a more-or-less privileged (well-off, most probably white and urban) demographic slice of American children “knew” about the world (e.g. short adventure stories they wrote or alphabetically ordered place names they asked about in their puzzles) and how they showcased this knowledge as puzzle-makers and finger-tip world travelers (navigating the globe on maps and table globes). Looking past these puzzles’ literary aspirations and entertaining façades, the chapter argues that accounting for the scalar tension that characterizes children’s playful relationship to the fundaments of cartography is key to understanding how they produced geographic knowledge of the empire and the world. Furthermore, by delving into the subjective, elusive, and playful nature of children’s geographical competencies, this chapter queries American children’s diverse range of geo-spatial practices of their own devising. To make sense of these practices, the chapter proposes the term “cartography in progress” that entails a set of meaningful cognitive, visual, tactile, and emotional practices that outstripped the borders of factual geography and troubled existing geographical definitions of the world as a homogenous, unitary space.

By examining a wide collection of letters children wrote and sent to St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys, this chapter discusses the range of often subversive spatial practices that children engaged with while consuming what adults had designed for them (e.g. schoolbooks and geographical games and toys). The chapter tracks the effects of seemingly unimportant events, such as a visit to a quarantine station off New York Harbor, a school fight in Weimar, Germany, etc., placing emphasis on what children “perceived” the world to be like. Close reading children’s often heavily edited letters, the chapter traces the responses that children had to compulsory education as they connected the individual, the local, and the child-specific to the collective, the global, and the geopolitical. Most significantly, what this chapter records includes the many ways the writing child related to American and non-American worlds as practices in home geography. The chapter establishes that the repository of children’s letters found in the juvenile periodicals of the time provides an essential supplement to the publicly available documents that were generated by adults, furnishing evidence, however mediated, as to how children perceived of the empire and its place in the world at large.

Asking “how far America was from the world? and “where in the world has it been imagined,” this chapter explores the many contours of late nineteenth-century US geography education, especially the pedagogic concept of “home geography”—a model that intended to foster local experiences and observations in order to convey a sense of the world as an eclectic collation of familiar spaces of comfort and civilization called “home.” The chapter argues that home geography invited students to view the United States as a home that was possible to compare to many across the globe, positing “home” in a thoroughly racialized binary opposition to whatever/whomever it excluded. The chapter further traces the path that geography took from a patriotic school subject in the wake of the American Revolution to a “modern” science by the end of the nineteenth century. Reborn as a modern science, the chapter proposes, American geography had become a most effective tool to present the nation’s ever-growing political and commercial entanglements with the world at large. In light of these changes, the chapter discusses how late nineteenth-century school geography was deployed to teach American children how to imagine, inherit, and manage their expanding nation and its overseas empire.

This chapter argues that turn-of-the-century American children took their knowledge of world geography out of schoolbooks and appropriated it in strikingly diverse and subversive ways. As the chapter discusses, as letter writers and puzzle-makers (but also as diarists and poets, among others), as students and playmates, as reinscriptive cartographers and world travelers, children authored and narrated a world that was not only intimately out of scale and variously impressionistic but also categorically unplottable. The chapter further studies the proliferation of schooling and teaching methods, policies, and practices in the Philippines at the start of the twentieth century, asking whether the proliferation of educational discourses that (a) exposed Filipino children to a US-authored version of global geography, and (b) taught American children to view far-flung parts of the world, such as the Philippines, as “belonging to them,” convinced children to engage in the material processes of sustaining and celebrating the American empire? As the book’s conclusion, the chapter re-visits Huckleberry Finn in a short story about world travel, arguing that, while adults produced the idea and image of empire, it was children who inherited these narratives and acted as more than mere performers of the empire’s scripts of fate and fiasco.

Examining the far-from-linear, cross-generational exchanges and disruptions that characterize any and every political project as tenuous as empire, this introductory chapter aims to discuss the semantic career of geography and cartography as geo-technologies for teaching American children about the world in the 1890s. Studying the liaison between childhood and empire both inside and outside American classrooms, the chapter explores the points of convergence between geopolitics, imperial literacy, cognitive mapping, and the imagined place of the young American nation in—and in relation to—the world at large. The chapter argues that since modern imperialism has always been a longitudinal project that coincides with the growing-up of at least two generations, it is imperative to revise the study of US empire by questioning both the boundaries and the contents of historical archives. The chapter sets the stage for the ensuing, theory-driven discussions in Citizens and Rulers of the World for a microhistorical investigation of US empire in the frame of what the chapter terms “a semiotics of the overlooked”: meaning-making instances of cognitive mapping that read the contents of school primers, cartographic maps, and geographic toys designed for children alongside letters, geographical brainteasers, and puzzles composed primarily by well-off white children.

Studying the playing child outside the confines of the schoolroom, this chapter studies world geography as child entertainment. Following a survey of the origins of geographical games that were initially designed in imperial Europe and a discussion on dissecting and playing with world maps, the chapter examines how dissected maps and geographical games tutored children in heavily racialized ways of seeing the larger world and imagining the United States as a central, or at least prominent, part of it. The chapter further illustrates how dissected maps and geography-themed picture puzzles placed children in an intimate, at once cognitive and tactile relationship to cartography, teaching children about the geographic urgencies of the US empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining US-manufactured dissected maps and picture puzzles (including The Battle of Manila (1898), Up the Heights of San Juan (1898), and The Philippines Dissected Map (1900)) in tandem with the imperatives of an ever more complex and globally involved United States, the chapter studies dissected maps as geographically scripted material with a range of intended and unintended meanings and uses in fostering lessons in “home geography” and in direct conversation with the shifting geopolitical interests of the expanding US empire.