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Solsiree del Moral, Mahshid Mayar. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1270–1271, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae205
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Mahshid Mayar’s Citizens and Rulers of the World is a study of cartography, geography, US empire, and American children in the 1890s. Mayar focuses on cartography as a site of contestation that challenges the idea that maps tell truths and represent facts. She explores the dynamic ways geographers and cartographers tried to capture the spatial expansion of the US nation westward and overseas into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Maps were never static nor free from the politics of power and the state. Rather, they became an educational tool for the public to understand the place of the US nation in the world. US geography, an increasingly professionalized field and emerging modern science in the late nineteenth century, promoted the use of maps in the schoolhouse. Not simply adding maps to the curriculum, but rather developing geography courses, was one way that teachers could help American students learn about the increasingly powerful role of the United States in the world, in addition to their particular duties as US citizens.
