Empire's Nursery : Children's Literature and the Origins of the American Century

**How children and children’s literature helped build America’s empire** America’s empire was not made by adults alone. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young people became essential to its creation. Through children’s literature, authors instilled the idea of America’s power and the importance of its global prominence. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America’s indispensability to the international order. Empires more generally require stories to justify their existence. Children’s literature seeded among young people a conviction that their country’s command of a continent (and later the world) was essential to global stability. This genre allowed ardent imperialists to obscure their aggressive agendas with a veneer of harmlessness or fun. The supposedly nonthreatening nature of the child and children’s literature thereby helped to disguise dominion’s unsavory nature. The modern era has been called both the “American Century” and the “Century of the Child.” Brian Rouleau illustrates how those conceptualizations came together by depicting children in their influential role as the junior partners of US imperial enterprise. America's empire was not made by adults alone. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young people became essential to its creation. Through children's literature, authors instilled the idea of America's power and the importance of its global prominence. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America's indispensability to the international order.0Empires more generally require stories to justify their existence. Children's literature seeded among young people a conviction that their country's command of a continent (and later the world) was essential to global stability. This genre allowed ardent imperialists to obscure their aggressive agendas with a veneer of harmlessness or fun. The supposedly nonthreatening nature of the child and children's literature thereby helped to disguise dominion's unsavory nature.0The modern era has been called both the "American Century" and the "Century of the Child." Brian Rouleau illustrates how those conceptualizations came together by depicting children in their influential role as the junior partners of US imperial enterprise "America's empire was not made by adults only. In fact, junior citizens were essential to its creation. Children's literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to impart an imperial consciousness among the nation's youth, while adult authors strive to raise rising generations of enthusiastic juvenile jingoes. But young people were neither unwitting nor unwilling puppets in the propagation of America's expansionistic foreign policy. Instead, Empire's Nursery demonstrates that juvenile readers often played an active part in committing the country to adventurism overseas. The history of the United States in the world must therefore make room for the country's littlest policymakers. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America's indispensability to the international order. The American Century's actualization depended upon the patient work of writers proselytizing among the youthful millions educated to embrace their Uncle Sam's growing global entanglements"-- Provided by publisher Contents Introduction: Juvenile Foreign Relations; or, Policy at the Level of Popular Fiction 1. How the West Was Fun 2. Serialized Imperialism 3. Empire’s Amateurs 4. Internationalist Impulses 5. Dollar Diplomacy for the Price of a Few Nickels 6. Comic Book Cold War Epilogue: The Empire Writes Back Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author How the West was fun -- Serialized Impreialism -- Empire's amateurs -- Internationalist impulses -- Dollar diplomacy for the price of a few nickels -- Comic book cold war.