Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire by Mahshid Mayar (review)

Reviewed by: Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire by Mahshid Mayar Yukako Otori Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. By Mahshid Mayar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xvi + 240 pp. Cloth $95.00, paper $32.95, e-book $25.99. Mahshid Mayar's Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire is a page-turner for scholars interested in how children learn to make sense of the world and their place in it. This book is also an appealing addition to transnational American Studies as it explores how [End Page 511] white American children engaged with the world beyond their daily horizons in the 1890s, when the United States grew into an oceanic empire. After the Gilded Age heralded a new era in cartographic imagination, America's imperial advancement led to the development of geographical education through formal schooling and informal learning. What Mayar calls "the Treffpunkte between the nation and its spatially unsettled empire" (5) was accessible to children from the beginning. Indeed, children emerged as a target audience whose cognitive map should be crafted in a way to train them as future stewards of the American empire. Mayar takes the argument further as she investigates child-produced quizzes and other underrecognized sources to visualize children as active users of geographical information, both factual and imagined, real and desired. Chapter 1 tracks the making of American geography with a focus on its pedagogical agenda. At the center of Mayar's analysis are a series of primers and textbooks that guided American children, mainly native-born whites, to comprehend the world as an extension of their home and neighborhood. As Mayar shows, this mindset defined the ways that Americans navigated geographical facts and images for years to come. In Chapter 2, she takes us outside the classroom through scanning the domestic use of dissected maps and picture puzzles as interactive tools of learning. By the 1890s, these educational playthings became popular items of home entertainment among middle-class families. Putting together small pieces in a specific arrangement and completing a geographically scripted image allowed children to play with the world visually and tangibly, thereby leading them to master the contours of the American empire. At the time of the Spanish-American War, mass-produced picture puzzles kept them updated about its geopolitical transformations. In this chapter Mayar recasts childhood as performance in the footsteps of Robin Bernstein, Sabine Frühstück, and others trained in cultural studies, yet her taste for cultural geography opens new vistas. Mayar's narrative becomes more child-centric in Chapters 3 and 4, where she highlights children as quiz makers and letter writers whose texts were published in Harper's Young People and St. Nicholas, two of the most widely circulated American children's periodicals of the time. She is fully aware that these sources are available for scholarly analysis because they percolated through adult editorial filters. Still, her tactful analysis reveals some patterns of how a certain fraction of American children—geography-savvy boys and girls raised in middle- or upper-class families, predominantly white and native-born—grasped distant places and crafted spatial narratives of their own. Chapter 3, where Mayar teases out their curiosity and fun-driven nature from the archive of child-composed puzzles, represents the book's methodological innovativeness. In their storytelling and puzzle-making endeavors, children associated [End Page 512] different places to each other in playful ways so that they defied the political and socioeconomic orders envisaged by American adults. In the last chapter, Mayar probes letters sent to the two magazines from young readers, including those living abroad. While their youthful imaginings did not always follow the pedagogic agenda of the time, many internalized nationalistic pride and racialized perspectives on Indigenous and foreign populations. Their behaviors subverted some of the expectations that adults imposed on them but not necessarily the American empire itself. Mayar's superb analysis notwithstanding, race could be more thoroughly adopted throughout the book, but especially in this last chapter. As Mayar delves into the world...