Current debates around the banning of books are a reminder that children's literature—however innocuous it appears on the surface—is anything but apolitical. The ways that children's literature and discourses around it serve as battlegrounds for broader contestations of power form the focus of Brian Rouleau's Empire's Nursery. The book explores how ideas of American imperialism were constructed, contested, and reimagined within a wide variety of genres from the Civil War era to the Vietnam War, a period that witnessed dramatic changes in US foreign policy and in ideas about childhood. These developments may seem distinct at first glance, but Rouleau shows how they were intricately connected. Throughout Empire's Nursery, Rouleau emphasizes how child readers were not simply passive audiences but architects who shaped conversations around the US's expanding domestic and foreign roles.
Empire's Nursery opens with an analysis of the role of Westerns in supporting and legitimizing settler colonialism during the postbellum period. The second chapter shifts from the US's transcontinental empire to its overseas empire around the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on the books produced by Edward Stratemeyer and his syndicate, who are best known for writing the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories but also published hundreds of books, including many designed to stimulate youth interest in the US's overseas empire, especially as the US engaged in conflicts such as the War of 1898 and US-Philippine War. In both chapters, Rouleau details how the stories encouraged young readers to embrace their imperial responsibility and normalized insensitivity to different ethnic and racial groups by depicting Native Americans as “demonic” and Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos as subordinate, feminine, childlike, and weak. Scholars have long discussed these tropes in literature by and for adults, but Rouleau identifies their robust appearance in the literary world of juvenile audiences.
When these stories emerged in the late 1800s, young people's lives were becoming increasingly circumscribed, with the expansion of compulsory education and a growing conceptualization of children as dependents. Stories of the frontier and empire overseas offered young readers a space where they could imagine acting free from adult supervision and enjoying independence denied to them at home. The third chapter, on “Empire's Amateurs,” delves more deeply into the theme of how fantasies of adolescents’ personal power and America's national status were interconnected through a study of broadsheets produced by youths. Young people used these newspapers to engage in diplomatic questions and thereby establish their maturity. By replicating settler colonial hierarchies, they endeavored to access the same power and privileges of adults who participated in US expansionism.
The next two chapters look at literature during the early twentieth century, especially the interwar period, and examine shifting discourses about US imperialism. Chapter 4 analyzes missionary publications and series, such as Lucy Fitch Perkins's “Twins” and Mary Hazelton Wade's The Little Cousin, to trace how themes of cultural internationalism, pacifism, cooperation, and diversity emerged in opposition to the celebratory, pro-expansion messages of earlier literature. Yet even within these texts that supposedly acted as bridges of cultural understanding, Anglocentrism and cultural stereotypes persisted. In chapter 5, Rouleau considers pulp fiction in the context of dollar diplomacy. These stories concretized abstract concepts like capitalism for its young readers and emphasized the redemptive and transformative power American money could have abroad. The nature of empire was now more a matter of indirect influence rather than taking territory, but, like earlier Westerns and serials, pulp fiction proselytized US power, the necessity and benevolence of American interventionism, and the immutability of racial hierarchies.
The Second World War and Cold War marked a new era in the politicization of the young, with the state taking a more direct and systematic role in shaping children's literature. Chapter 6 examines this increasing influence through comic books, which Rouleau argues was the most significant form of children's literature in the twentieth century and among the most important tools to mobilize youth against communism. The state's use of comic books to sell the American way extended beyond US borders, as the government circulated comics to regions like Latin America to ensure children's loyalty. The employment of comic books to win the hearts and minds of children persisted beyond the Cold War, with the US government even designing comics for Iraqi children to bolster its foreign policy objectives in the early 2000s. Empire's Nursery concludes with an epilogue that outlines different types of children's media, from television to the internet, and shifts in the themes of children's literature from the 1960s. Rendered static and silent in genres of previous eras, people with experiences of American imperialism wrote back against the empire and described the oppression they faced. This more diverse cast of voices, along with disillusionment over the Vietnam War, made assertions about America's right to rule more difficult to sustain within children's literature.
Throughout Empire's Nursery, Rouleau grapples with key challenges one is confronted with when researching childhood and literature, namely questions of child agency and assessing children's reaction to and engagement with the texts they read. Through his meticulous analysis of letters to the editor, fan mail, amateur newspapers, and adult recollections, Rouleau sheds light on children's complex responses to texts and how they participated in conversations and even exercised a certain degree of influence over the content of publications. One way Rouleau illustrates this point is through attention to the gender of readers. The target audience of these texts were white, middle-class boys, yet girls enthusiastically devoured the stories. Girl readers wrote letters demanding changes to stories’ stereotyped portrayal of women and penned their own stories that challenged the notion of women as secondary characters and passive victims who belonged in the home. However, even as they questioned gender ideals within the stories, girls did not subvert the overall aims of the settler colonial project. While children did criticize imperial messages, Rouleau repeatedly makes the point that agency is expressed not only by dissent and resistance but also through assent and the affirmation of the status quo. Chapter 3 on amateur publishing most thoroughly uncovers how young authors propagated the mythologization of the US empire and rehearsed settler conquest in their own writings, but this theme emerges as a recurring thread throughout the book. In investigating these questions of agency and reception, Rouleau shatters any notions that writers and publishers had absolute power over their readers and instead highlights the dynamic relationship between writers and readers.
Empire's Nursery makes a valuable contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the relationship between youth culture and US imperialism. While most scholarship focuses on children's education and youth organizations, less research exists on the role of children's literature in the construction of American imperialism, and even less on the role young people played in supporting it. Empire's Nursery demonstrates how reading and writing was a principal forum through which adults articulated their vision of America's role as a global power and juvenile writers affirmed and reappropriated this vision. Moreover, while most work on foreign relations and youth culture focuses on the Cold War period, the broader time frame of Empire's Nursery underscores how beliefs in US exceptionalism had long formed a cornerstone of children's literature and how closely intertwined the “American Century” and “Century of the Child” were. In doing so, Empire's Nursery brings seemingly disparate fields, namely diplomatic history and childhood history, into productive conversations with one another.
Empire's Nursery also importantly opens new avenues for future studies. Rouleau's focus on the popular press means that large segments of the population—including working-class, immigrant, unschooled, Black, Native American, and Asian young people—are not discussed at length. Yet the author provides tantalizing hints about how one might further explore the role of these groups in shaping discourses about America's empire. For instance, he mentions how amateur presses at Native American boarding schools provided a forum in which Indigenous children could challenge Anglocentric stories that often marginalized their voices and articulate their own visions of a future in which they had an integral role. Rouleau's insightful analysis of youth-produced newspapers demonstrates the need for greater work on amateurdom, which he describes as “perhaps the single largest public sphere historians have yet to explore” (17). Empire's Nursery consequently makes noteworthy contributions to a variety of fields by drawing attention to important but understudied battles over children's literature and how young people shaped colonial ideologies and discourses.
