Maps and Mini-Imperialists

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Children no longer reside on the periphery of studies of empire. Over the past two decades, a robust body of scholarship has demonstrated that youngsters—both as symbols and as flesh-and-blood individuals—have been crucial to the project of empire building. This is particularly true when examining the history of the United States, an empire whose central tenet was a denial of its own imperialism. Cultural constructions of childhood innocence and vulnerability bolstered justifications for U.S. political and territorial expansion in the name of uplift. And youngsters’ perceived malleability made them prime targets for efforts to mold imperial citizens and subjects. Youth groups, schools, and children’s material culture, recent scholarship has demonstrated, helped mold young imperialists—even as children themselves challenged or revised the lessons imparted by their elders. For example, Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy examines how the Boy Scouts helped support American global expansionism across the twentieth century.1 In a similar vein, Brian Rouleau’s Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century explores how children’s books cultivated what Rouleau calls an “imperial consciousness.”2 Mahshid Mayar’s new book Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire adds to this productive conversation. The book focuses on children’s complex relationship with maps and map-making during the 1890s. It examines how U.S. geopolitical power was represented spatially and how the meanings of this power were conveyed to the next generation.