Dear Subscribers,

 

We would like to announce a new publication from New York University Press, which we hope will be of interest.

 

Empire’s Nursery

Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century

Brian Rouleau

 

https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781479804474/empires-nursery/

 

Available in print and digital formats

 

Receive a 20% discount online*:

CSLF2021

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30^th June 2022. Discount only applies to the CAP website.

 

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.

Brian Rouleau is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire.

With all best wishes,

 

Combined Academic Publishers

 

New York University Press | September 2021 | 336pp | 9781479804474 | HB | £26.99*

*Price subject to change.

 

The ebook version of this title available through all major digital vendors and retailers. If you wish to purchase this title for your library then please contact your library supplier. For more information on ebook purchasing please follow this link - https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/ebooks/