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

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.

Author: Mahshid Mayar
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/29/2022
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.82lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 0.53d
ISBN13: 9781469667287
ISBN10: 1469667282
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | General
- History | United States | 19th Century
- Political Science | Geopolitics