Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire

Bringing together children, maps, and empire, Mahshid Mayar's Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire sets out to explore how the United States in the 1890s used geography and cartography to teach Americans, and children in particular, about their place in the world as citizens of both a nation and an empire.Among the book's central arguments is the contention that maps "enabled Americans, young and old, to locate themselves in the world's expanse as citizens of an aspiring world power and to navigate the world in order to produce, access, appropriate, make sense of, or dominate its various parts, developing and concretizing ideas about the commercial, ideological, and imperial role of the United States in relation to other empires, nations, and colonies" (18).In order to scrutinize these dynamics, Mayar studies a variety of primary sourcesamong them cartographic maps, school textbooks, journals, magazines, and different types of games and toysthat, together, she reads as discourses of US empire, allowing her to examine the cultural work these geographical imaginations did.The book's introduction contextualizes and locates this study within a number of scholarly fields, among them empire studies, childhood studies, and geography, which infuse Mayar's focus on writing a particular cultural history with interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual cues.Methodologically, the book positions itself as part of a "global microhistory" (20), a recent approach that emphasizes the connections between local spaces and global dynamics (Berg).In particular, it is through what Mayar calls "a semiotics of the overlooked" (20) that she investigates and analyzes her material, focusing on children as significant actors in the making of history.The book features four central analytical chapters, with the first two focusing on material produced for (predominantly white middle-class) children and the latter two on material written by them.Chapter 1, "Growing Up and Going Far: Geography Primers, 'Home Geography,' and the World," analyzes geography textbooks as reflections of how Americans positioned and imagined themselves vis-à-vis the world, and chapter 2, "Quiet as Mice: Dissected Maps, Domestic Fun, and the World in Pieces," complements this