Fallen, Broken Places: American Imperial Journalism and Thomas W. Knox’s Traveller Books for Boys

Abstract

ABSTRACT In early 1864, Civil War correspondent Thomas W. Knox nearly gave his life for a brave experiment to prove the labor of freedmen could be just as profitable as that of slaves on a cotton farm. Ironically, in the years that followed, Knox traveled the world writing guidebooks for boys that served to teach all the ways the developing world was inferior to American culture, and sought to indoctrinate young American readers into their role as colonizers. What appear initially to be a correspondent’s enlightened, forward-thinking attitudes turn out to be deeply problematic in ways that raise profound questions about the American discourse on race. For the past thirty years, postcolonial studies have moved into “low,” popular literature. This study attempts to push the field into a new direction: the examination of American correspondents beyond canonical figures like Mark Twain, Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and Stephen Crane.