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9781469667287 Academic Inspection Copy

Citizens and Rulers of the World

The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire
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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 U.S. empire.
Mahshid Mayar is assistant professor of American studies at Universitat Bielefeld, Germany, and research fellow at the English Department, Amherst College, Massachusetts.
"Intriguing . . . Mayar has done a convincing job of plotting the course of this ever-shifting, unwieldly world of children's geography."--The Portolan "The book will generate discussion and debate about the ways scholars might approach the study of children, educational materials and toys, and national identity."--American Historical Review
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