Lydia Maria Child’s groundbreaking Juvenile Miscellany fairly barked, squeaked, whooshed, scratched, smelled, and tasted of nature and its creatures. Published in Boston between 1826 and 1836, the magazine announced clearly its overarching purpose: “For the instruction and amusement of Youth.” Child’s opening “Address to the Young” notes that she has “forgotten what pleased me, when I was a child,” and thus she empowers children, avowing that “you, my young friends, shall be my critics: What you find, neither affords you amusement or does you good, I shall think is badly written.” Improving one’s character, she stresses, requires perseverance, attentiveness, and—perhaps most remarkably—learning “ to think for yourselves ” (emphasis in original). 1 Among the journal’s favored subjects were children’s relationship to nature and the environment, broadly construed. Notwithstanding Child’s ostensible accent on a juvenile audience, she embedded much larger ambitions in her editorship, which ended shortly after she issued her abolitionist text, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). Child aimed her innovative magazine at parents as well as children, pursuing the broader conceptual and social transformations that frequently fueled her other work. Under her direction, the magazine entered important public debates about such twenty-first-century matters as conservation, interspecies relations and, through nature-centered discourses, imperialism. While she helped construct normative American childhood as white, middle-class, New England-based, and increasingly urban, Child revised standard scripts surrounding environmental issues and intercultural relationships by reinventing the putatively adult genre of natural history. 2 Emerging when the distinction between children’s and adult literature was blurred or nonexistent, the Miscellany often lodged progressive messages in its informative and playful pages. Under Child’s editorship, the journal merits consideration alongside works by such writers as Jefferson, Bartram, Audubon, and Thoreau, not just because it strongly complements these writers—and features some prominent early women contributors engaged in environmental work—but also because it anticipates many of today’s central environmental concerns.