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

By Mahshid Mayar

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469667294

Mahshid Mayar

Mahshid Mayar is assistant professor of American studies at Universitat Bielefeld, Germany, and research fellow at the English Department, Amherst College, Massachusetts.

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Cover: Citizens and Rulers of the World by Mahshid Mayar

Citizens and Rulers of the World

MAHSHID MAYAR

Citizens and Rulers of the World

The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Complete Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052602.

ISBN 978-1-4696-6727-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6728-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6729-4 (ebook)

Cover illustration: Boy on deck, Harper’s Young People 1885 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885), title page. From the author’s collection.

A shorter, earlier version of Chapter 2 previously appeared as From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, in Knowledge Landscapes North America, ed. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, American Studies: A Monograph Series, vol. 273 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016), 99–118.

for

[m],

my favorite share of the alphabet

and to my students

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: I Know by the Color

CHAPTER ONE

Growing Up and Going Far: Geography Primers, Home Geography, and the World

CHAPTER TWO

Quiet as Mice: Dissected Maps, Domestic Fun, and the World in Pieces

CHAPTER THREE

A for Amoy, Z for Zanesville: Child-Made Geographical Puzzles, Finger-Tip Travelers, and Cartographic Intimacies of the World

CHAPTER FOUR

We Sing a Geography Song: The Writing Child, the Portable Home Front, and World Geography

Conclusion: Huckleberry Finn in the World

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

I.1 David Harvey, Grid of Spatial Practices   19

1.1 Samuel Goodrich, Going to tell about Geography   31

1.2 Samuel Goodrich, A Chinese selling Rats and Puppies for pies   33

1.3 Samuel Goodrich, Norwegian   33

1.4 William Channing Woodbridge, Comparative size and appearance of the Planets   35

1.5 Samuel Goodrich, Picture of the World   36

1.6 Samuel Goodrich, Picture of the World   38

1.7 Sanford Niles, Chart Showing the Distribution of the Races of Men   39

1.8 H. Justin Roddy, Map of the World Showing Colonial Possessions   42

1.9 Edwin Grant Dexter, Programme for Fully Graded System   45

1.10 Geography is the description of the surface of the earth, and its countries and their inhabitants   53

1.11 Mary Howe Smith Pratt, Races of Men   54

1.12 Charles F. King, Map of Pond   58

2.1 John Spilsbury, Europe Divided into Its Kingdoms   64

2.2 Inside cover of the box of the Series of Dissected Maps   68

2.3 Seat of War in the Island of Luzon   72

2.4 Original box of Clemens’ Silent Teacher   75

2.5 Box Cover of Clemens’ Silent Teacher   77

2.6 A New Dissected Map of the World with a Picture Puzzle of the Capitol at Washington   82

2.7 Up the Heights of San Juan: Our Boys Storming the Blockhouse in Front of Santiago   83

2.8 The Nations at Peace   86

3.1 Sam Loyd, Get Off the Earth Puzzle Mystery   95

3.2 (a) (left) Sam Loyd, The Lost Jap   96

3.2 (b) (right) Sam Loyd, Puzzle of Teddy and the Lion   97

3.3 Geographical Guessthestory, Harper’s Young People   100

3.4 River Puzzle, Harper’s Young People   103

3.5 Geographical Puzzle, Harper’s Young People   105

3.6 Alphabetical Cities, Harper’s Young People   114

3.7 Geographical Puzzle, Harper’s Young People   115

3.8 Answer to Geographical Puzzle, Harper’s Young People   117

3.9 Geographical Puzzle, Harper’s Young People   120

3.10 Pied Cities, Harper’s Young People   123

3.11 Hidden Rivers, Harper’s Young People   124

4.1 List of children’s names whose letters were not printed in St. Nicholas   130

4.2 Letter by Elizabeth Haviland Brown, St. Nicholas   153

C.1 Haroun Al Huck-El-Berri and the Seven Sages of Bagdad, St. Nicholas   160

Acknowledgments

As a genre, acknowledgments go beyond mere form. People and their generosity do not need to be formatted and referenced in conformity with this or that manual of style to be valid. Thus, free from the burden of endnotes or citations, my foremost thanks go to Angelika Epple and Heike Paul, who supported me in my encounters with the exciting challenges of completing a project that, from the outset, stood at the intersection of geographies, disciplines, and agencies. It was with their critical support and encouragement that I went through drafts of my chapters, changed my manuscript’s title, and won against the chaos of endnotes. Even earlier than that, it was Robert W. Cherny who saw me as a historian in the first place. I can never thank him enough. Amy Kaplan opened the door to critical thinking in every single one of her works that I have encountered—this book is dedicated to her memory. Sabine Schaefer, Rita Gaye, Thomas Abel, and Thomas Welskopp—thanks for what the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) has been as a workspace because of your presence. And, at UNC Press, my sincere thanks to Mark Simpson-Vos, Catherine Hodorowicz, Dominique Moore, María Isela García, and the anonymous reviewers whose careful reading of my work helped it become a better version of itself.

Since my initial encounter with historical childhood in the Internet Archive, I have frequented a large number of archives and libraries. Early on, Uwe Spiekermann of the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., made it possible for me to access the digitized copies of St. Nicholas, and I am ever thankful for his and his colleagues’ generosity. It was with the financial support of the BGHS that I made it to the collections at the Library of Congress, the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, and the Newberry Library, where months of digitizing sources and browsing collections revealed more than I could ever have wished for about the politics of archiving children’s material. Also, sincere thanks to Sybille Jagusch, head of the Children’s Literature Center at the Library of Congress, for her stimulating company and her guiding hand through the library’s immense collections. Numerous archival trips, in person and online, funded by the German Research Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Bavarian American Academy, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Bielefeld Young Researchers’ Fund, and the International Youth Library have made the completion of this project possible. Digitized sources available on the internet pages of Harvard University, the Newberry Library, the Cotsen Children’s Library, the University of Indiana, the New-York Historical Society, Georgetown University, the University of Southern Mississippi, the Strong National Museum of Play, the American Antiquarian Society, Project Gutenberg, Amherst College, and Google Books, as well as friends with the right IP address, spared me numerous trips to the U.S. embassy to apply for one-entry visas.

I am deeply indebted to Amy Kaplan, Ann Laura Stoler, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Hsuan L. Hsu, James R. Akerman, Joyce Chaplin, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Megan Norcia, Martin Brückner, Neil Smith, Patricia Crain, Robin Bernstein, and Susan Schulten, whose brilliant works on empire, geography and cartography, children and childhood, pedagogies of empire, literacy, race and coloniality, and the historical archive as they see it introduced me to a wealth of maps and chapbooks, itineraries and toponyms, publishing houses and fantasylands, child diaries and doodles. Also, thanks to the Bielefeld University library, especially Gabriele Pendorf and Sabine Rahmsdorf, for acquiring the numerous volumes that I suggested and for having made the library a welcoming place on days when I could not work in the isolation of my office. An earlier, shorter draft of chapter 2 originally appeared in Knowledge Landscapes North America. I thank Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, the volume’s editors, and the Winter Verlag for permission to reprint portions of that chapter here.

I do not have enough words to thank my colleagues and friends at the Department of British and American Studies at Bielefeld University, the International Youth Library, the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., the Bavarian American Academy, the BGHS, and the German Association for American Studies for the wondrous communities they have been. Alexander Martin, Ann Laura Stoler, Anne Friedrichs, Brian Rozema, Christen Mucher, Cleovi Mosuela, Gleb J. Albert, Helen Gibson, Jessica Pliley, Katherine Aid, Patricia Skorge, Stephen Morgan, Vivian Gramley, and Wilfried Raussert read various drafts of my chapters at a time when I needed their edifying touches the most. Andres Cardona, Barrett Watten, Bettina Brandt, Brian Rouleaue, Christina Meyer, Djelal Kadir, Hedwig Richter, Jörg Bergmann, Julia Roth, Kritika Agarwal, Ludmilla Jordanova, Marc Priewe, Marion Schulte, Meike Zwingenberger, Mischa Honeck, Michelle Tiedje, Nicole Waller, Petra Woersching, Ruben Quaas, Sabine Meyer, Shahzad Bashir, Ulla Kriebernegg, and Wai Chee Dimock cheered me on through stimulating seminars, talks, and conference panels, or in informal exchanges. Sincere thanks to Amy Leonard, Georgetown University, for hosting me and facilitating my first-ever archival research at the Library of Congress. And a heartfelt thank-you to Karen Sánchez-Eppler for her interest in my work and her hospitality during the time I spent at Amherst College as a postdoctoral visiting fellow.

During the time I worked on this manuscript, I had numerous friends by my side, people whose generosity with their time, sense of humor, and intellect made the writing process a delight. My friends in and out of academia (Afrooz Rajoul, Amir Sadeghipour, Annette Rukwied, Carmen Dexl, Cedric Essi, Diana Fulger, Dorsa Ghaemi, Elena Furlanetto, Elena Matveeva, Hamedeh Saghafi, Hasti Khodabakhsh, Hediyeh Nasseri, Helen Gibson, Hoda Badr, Jana Kristin Hoffmann, Jens Temmen, Judith Rauscher, Julia Andres, Julia Faisst, Julia and Raphael Susewind, Jürgen Lange, Katharina Hoß, Katharina Pohl, Maryam Armaghan, Masoomeh Rezaei, Matin Rahmandoost, Melanie Dejnega, Monika Bokermann, Özlem Tan, Parisa Assar, Samae Bagheri, Sarah-Lena Essifi, Yaatsil Guevara González, and Zoltan Simon) and my officemates over the years I spent with this book (Alexandra Nitz, Arne Käthner, Astrid Haas, Eduardo Relly, Li Sun, Luisa Ellermeier, Matti Steinitz, and Sune Bechmann Pedersen) turned this project into a process of (re-)making friends. Also, thanks to the wonderful students in my childhood studies and new empire studies seminars, whose inquisitive passion propelled me forward with the revisions. Brigitte Tlatlik, Christine Schmuckert, and Silvia Toma—I can never thank you enough for your open hearts and warm smiles. Azadeh, Cleovi, Katharina, Lili, Michelle, Narges, Niko, Pat, Sandra, Somayyeh, Stephen, Tyll, and Yaatsil—countless thanks for your friendship, the long chats, the much-needed walks, and the laughter.

I am further indebted to a wide number of objects and spaces: the mug I inherited from Li Sun; the table lamp Sune Bechmann gave me; the table globe that Masoud gifted me to help me survive the brain’s storm; The Coffee Store, my favorite Bielefeld café; Hassan’s tea-stand at Bielefeld University; my personal archive in the form of seven envelopes on my office wall; and all the means of procrastination—including books, computer games, movies, other writing projects, and the almighty Internet—made it possible for me to reside in familiar spaces while navigating the terra incognita of children’s worlds.

And Masoud, who has been sitting next to me, now and always, joking about his prime role in the completion of this book—thank you for holding, sharing, being the home.

Citizens and Rulers of the World

Introduction

I Know by the Color

There was one thing that kept bothering me, and by and by I says:

Tom, didn’t we start east?

Yes.

How fast have we been going?

Well, you heard what the professor said when he was raging round. Sometimes, he said, we was making fifty miles an hour, sometimes ninety, sometimes a hundred; said that with a gale to help he could make three hundred any time, and said if he wanted the gale, and wanted it blowing the right direction, he only had to go up higher or down lower to find it.

Well, then, it’s just as I reckoned. The professor lied.

Why?

Because if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois, oughtn’t we?

Certainly.

Well, we ain’t.

What’s the reason we ain’t?

I know by the color. We’re right over Illinois yet. And you can see for yourself that Indiana ain’t in sight.

I wonder what’s the matter with you, Huck. You know by the COLOR?

Yes, of course I do.

What’s the color got to do with it?

It’s got everything to do with it. Illinois is green, Indiana is pink. You show me any pink down here, if you can. No, sir; it’s green.

Indiana PINK? Why, what a lie!

It ain’t no lie; I’ve seen it on the map, and it’s pink.

You never see a person so aggravated and disgusted. He says:

Well, if I was such a numbskull as you, Huck Finn, I would jump over. Seen it on the map! Huck Finn, did you reckon the States was the same color out-of-doors as they are on the map?

Tom Sawyer, what’s a map for? Ain’t it to learn you facts?

Of course.

Well, then, how’s it going to do that if it tells lies? That’s what I want to know.

Shucks, you muggins! It don’t tell lies.

It don’t, don’t it?

—Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894

Forced to board a mad scientist’s balloon for a trip around the world, Tom, Huck, and Jim heatedly debate what maps are for.¹ The satirical conversation documents the boys’ lack of experience as world travelers and their apparent unsuitability for the trip as poorly literate consumers of the most basic of tools such a trip would require: the world map. If they cannot read maps—if, in other words, they cannot agree as to how maps relate to landscape—then, how are they going to navigate the world?² Tom Sawyer Abroad’s characters’ diverse patterns of consuming, relating to, and remembering the truths that maps represent turn cartography into a site of contention.³ The boys’ disagreement has its origins in the fact that, as Twain reminds us, they encounter and read cartographic maps differently and, as a result, hold dissimilar views about their surroundings and of where and how, in the interaction between maps and landscapes, geographical views are formed. Despite the entirely different conclusions that Twain makes them ultimately draw as to what a map displays, the stereotypical white American teenagers Huck and Tom—and, by proxy, the freed slave Jim—do concur on one point: in their indispensability as tools of modern life, maps don’t tell lies.⁴ In effect, it is immediately after the boys naively agree that maps are incapable of lying that, in comparing maps with their not-yet-fully-formed perceptions of the external reality that maps stand for, their opposing readings of cartographic representations, scalar complexities, and coloring patterns clash.⁵ Addressing his young, mainly white, readers, Twain establishes that maps can be just as polysemous and confusing as they are factual and enlightening.

In its brevity, the passage underscores the multiplicity of individuals’ mental maps of seen and unseen landscapes. Unlike Tom, Huck insists that Indiana ought to be pink because his initial mental impression of that state was formed by a secondhand encounter with it through a colored paper map of the United States. Since Huck has put his trust in maps, for him pink (or blue or green) would precede the diverse spectrum of colors that the Indiana landscape offers when viewed from above. No doubt, Huck’s totalizing, playful, almost fanatical trust in cartographic verisimilitude, his inability to understand the subtleties involved in the concept of cartographic representation, and his presumption of a one-to-one relationship between a map and the landscape it represents appear simplistic in contrast with the more nuanced geographical understanding that Tom demonstrates.⁶ Tom, meanwhile, is incapable of further reasoning when confronted by Huck’s question: Tom Sawyer, what’s a map for? In the end, while still mostly disoriented, Tom and Huck agree that the purpose of a map is to learn you facts.

Thanks to the rise of lithography earlier in the nineteenth century, maps had become so widespread that Huck’s insistence that he had seen the color on the map confirms the ubiquity of maps in everyday American life, as a result of which, as Martin Brückner has observed, almost anyone could "cite

[them]

without the need to specify any particulars about the map’s make, author, or publisher."⁷ Perhaps a commentary on politics of space, Huck’s belief that Indiana should be pink in reality because it is pink in its scaled-down representation on the map reminds us of the ways that, at the height of the age of empire, cartographic maps were as much about defining, even dictating, the relationship between spatial representation and external reality as they were about charting out spaces and tagging them with colonial toponyms and colors. As Jean Baudrillard writes of maps and mapping since the age of empire, The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.⁸ Expanding on Baudrillard’s observations, Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul (whose ideas informed Benedict Anderson’s writing on colonial maps) has persuasively argued that once European empires rose to power, their maps began to precede, even suspend, external colonized spatial realities and to impose on them a new order as envisioned by the colonizer.⁹ As Tom and Huck’s debate confirms, by employing various scales and calculated patterns of absence and presence, cartographic maps masked, as much as they exposed, the nonlinear regimes of spatial knowledge production and the by-and-large disorienting relationships that groups of people were to develop with spaces and—through those spaces—with one another.

Right at the beginning of their involuntary world tour, Tom and Huck seem unable to relate to the map of their own country, let alone to that of the non-American world toward which they are bound. In Twain’s portrait of the boys, they seem to have a hands-on, if playfully misleading, knowledge of cartography: they know it is fundamental to locating oneself, navigating domestic and foreign spaces, and determining the distance between one’s place and other parts of the world. What is more, Twain echoes in the story American adults’ ongoing concerns that children’s geographic knowledge of the world is shifting, creative, and in urgent need of further formal training. More importantly—and I return to this point in chapter 1—as a politically minded American adult satirizing the limits of geographic knowledge among Americans (both children and adults), Twain points in this story to the still relatively peripheral state of world geography as a school subject, thus underscoring the significance of geographic literacy as a topic of national concern in the United States late in the century and questioning Americans’ awareness of this problem.¹⁰ On the whole, the story illustrates the significance of public understandings of geographic space and, specifically, of refining children’s understanding of America’s place in the world. As a satirical narrative, it further suggests that children’s playful modes of adapting geographic knowledge produces unpredictable relationships to and conceptions of the world.

Spaces of Empire

From its debates over geographic literacy to its bleak and alarming portrayal of children as inexperienced consumers of cartography, Tom Sawyer Abroad sets the stage for this book, in which I examine the semantic career of geography and cartography as geotechnologies for teaching Americans about the world in the 1890s.¹¹ Reading Huck, Tom, and Jim as fantastic shadows, as fictionalized effigies of real American children in their ambivalent, intimate relationships with maps and instances of mapping, and exploring the wider political implications of the production and reception of world geography knowledge by Americans, Citizens and Rulers of the World interrogates the points of convergence between geopolitics, imperial literacy, and the imagined place of the young American nation in—and in relation to—the world at large.¹² Intrigued by the multilayered liaison between childhood and imperial pedagogy over the course of U.S. national history, I attempt in the following chapters to trace heatedly debated issues that Mark Twain—and, by extension, much of white America—instructed modern, youthful, and adventurous turn-of-the-century Americans to learn and become conversant about in their often perplexing encounters with a colossal, eclectic global space that had already been mapped, for the most part, by European colonizers.

In other words, Citizens and Rulers of the World labors to read the ways in which the U.S. empire found itself in the world against, but also aligned with, the ways American children looked around to find their way in maps: How and through what forms of geographic knowledge and cartographic material did American adults—professional geographers, writers of school geography books, mapmakers, fiction and travel writers, and toy manufacturers—experience, imagine, and narrate the world outside the continental borders of the United States? More importantly, how did they communicate the nation’s transforming ideals, geopolitical aspirations, and cartographic urgencies to the next generation? In turn, to what extent was children’s understanding of world geography formed and informed by what they learned at school, played with in the evening, and wrote about while reflecting on their trips around the globe (or on the world map)? Ultimately, how and by what means did children come to terms with the United States’ changing geopolitical imperatives, draw playful sketches of the world, and narrate their own perceptions of the national, the imperial, and the global in spatial terms?

The turn-of-the-century United States faced numerous domestic issues. The closing of the western frontier, the backbreaking depression of the mid-1890s, the unprecedented increase in the number of foreign immigrants, concerns over socialist and communist tendencies, the challenge of sustaining an on-strike labor market, and the record mobility of the population—especially from rural to urban areas and from the South to the North—were among the forces that gave rise to pressing and complicated questions in American homes as well as in Congress, businesses, and schools.¹³ Troubled by urgent domestic issues during the tumultuous final decade of the nineteenth century, Americans further reflected on their comparatively short history as a nation; their position as one nation among many in a larger world; the urgency to build more overseas commercial, military, and diplomatic outposts; and how to raise and educate children as subjects immersed in the ways of the empire. By this time, some Americans had over a century of nationhood—in the spirit of republicanism—and continental expansion—disguised as westward expansion—at their disposal as forces with which to domesticate newly added spaces and to integrate formerly non-American territories into the nation’s geography through violently othering their earlier settlers.¹⁴ Children of the 1890s grew up amid such nationwide spatial tension. Still coming to terms with the complexities arising at the Treffpunkte between the nation and its spatially unsettled empire, Americans emphasized geography as a key component of their national history, a mode of navigating time and space, and a means of making sense of themselves and the world. In fact, white Americans wrote their national history first and foremost through focusing on the nation’s ever-changing geography and its national spatial be(com)ing. What there was to tell of American progress, Myra Jehlen remarks, was geographical, celebrated in the incarnation of the spirit of liberal idealism and the individualist self in the North American continent.¹⁵ As the following chapters demonstrate, Citizens and Rulers of the World examines this geographical incarnation of the national spirit beyond the North American continent, drawing focus to the U.S. empire’s unsettled global contours in the 1890s and beyond.

At the end of a century that put unprecedented emphasis on the human element in social sciences, politics, and natural sciences, and in light of the unique influence of industrialization and the ensuing urbanization and mobility of the human body across countries and between continents, geography also shifted, as a discipline, into the realms of the human and the political. Turn-of-the-century geography in the United States came, more than ever before, under heavy influence by European geography. This continental draft of geography had been developed by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Carl Ritter (1779–1859), and later Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) and Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). As I discuss in more detail in chapter 1, in the final decades of the century, geography was undergoing sweeping changes, evolving from an amateur fad to an academic discipline that was taught at the most prestigious colleges and universities in Europe and the United States, and from an all-inclusive field of inquiry to a modern science with singular disciplinary boundaries, methodologies, and theories. At the same time, and toward the end of the nineteenth century, the nation’s increasing emphasis on geography and spatial unity had roots in the rising concept of geopolitics. Simply put, geopolitics entailed an au courant reading of geography in political terms. Long at work in imperial dealings with the world, yet undertheorized by politicians and geographers of the time, geopolitics influenced even the most common definitions of geography. Geopolitik, in its traditional sense—that is, the influence of geography on the national and international policies of states—evolved out of the work of German zoologist, geographer, and ethnologist Friedrich Ratzel. Reconceived in this light, geography began in the 1880s and 1890s to be understood as the knowledge of spaces in relation to state power.¹⁶ By this time, geography was no longer seen as "something already possessed by the earth but an active writing of the earth" (emphasis in original).¹⁷

The many shifts in the direction geography took were mostly visible in frequent deliberations about the trade-off between human civilizations and in the mostly taken-for-granted hierarchies that associated racial differences with landscape and climate in the works of German, French, British, and, later American geographers. American geographers and geologists such as Richard Elwood Dodge (1868–1952) and William Morris Davis (1850–1934), and even historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), adopted variations of this post-Enlightenment, Eurocentric, relatively methodical understanding of geography as the study of the conditioning and competing interplay of the human, the social, and the natural, and ultimately of the ways various civilizations had evolved on regional and global scales.¹⁸

This shift in focus was further traceable, chapter 1 establishes, in the American schoolroom.¹⁹ As the century waned, geography was taught at an unprecedented number of schools across urban and rural America as a stand-alone science, at times in relation with commerce or industry, and often free from religious and historical undertones. This American draft of geography as a discipline was heavily informed by vast conceptual shifts in the understanding of geography as well as by material changes in U.S. foreign policy, the nation’s commercial priorities, and demands by professional geographers for resources to ensure the survival of nascent departments of geography at American colleges and universities. In response to these shifts and demands, professional organizations and educational committees, such as the Committee of Ten called for the revision and rewriting of geography schoolbooks. With professional geographers and geography teachers on board, and keeping an eye on the foundational changes introduced in secondary education in France, Britain, and Germany, the Committee of Ten convened in 1892 to assess the American high school curriculum, its weekly schedule, and the training of high school teachers as well as more general educational practices across the country. As the committee’s exhaustive report, published in the spring of 1894, testifies, the committee took a strong stance on the responsibility of the United States as a modern nation to think about its educational system beyond the national level and to keep the larger community of interests which now knit civilized peoples together at its heart.²⁰

Children of Empire

Here I wish to pause to briefly explore the pivotal place children and childhood occupy in this book’s overall narrative, as my arguments revolve around a strong interdependence between childhood as an inevitable process of growing up and the rise of the United States to global empire as a tenacious, predominantly white project of going far. Both before and after the invention of modern childhood in the West (if indeed such a turning point can ever be determined with any degree of certainty), adults have held a wide range of views as to who a child is (and should be) and how childhood should be placed and mapped.²¹ Since at least the start of the nineteenth century, and in the name of sheltering the cute and vulnerable figure of the child, adults have readily spatialized childhood and placed the child in the interiors of homes, orphanages, schoolrooms, and playgrounds, and, later in the twentieth century, in private bedrooms and amusement parks so much so that child vulnerability—and the necessity for the child to be (over)seen by adults—has synonymized childhood to domesticity. Following this, adults have either viewed childhood as a transitory biosocial stage of human life that is characterized by little or no power or attempted devising and coding childhood as a set of artifacts—in the form of education and entertainment—to be consumed by flesh-and-blood children. Indeed, ever since the Industrial Age capitalized on the commodification of concepts and objects alike, modern childhood has been understood by a great number of thinkers as an artifact in the making, a construct devised by adults: Childhood is like a toy, write Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, something designed by adults and given to children.²² Put differently, generations of adults have coded and formed childhood as a versatile, multipurpose object that in turn is to be decoded, even de-formed, by children.²³ Adults have further implemented the construct of childhood as collective emotional leverage for social and political change or invoked it as a metaphorical reference to financial or political dependence (perceived to be symptomatic of poverty, insanity, enslavement, sexual deviation, or colonizability).²⁴

Already over a century old as a nation, the turn-of-the-century white Americans continued to discuss and reflect on definitions of childhood and children’s unique modes of