Abstract
This article discusses how, following in the footsteps of United States imperial children’s writers Jacob Abbott and Edward Stratemeyer, Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade (1860–1936), the original author of the Our Little Cousins series (1901–1905), contributed to the American culture of empire. Wade was one of the most prolific and popular imperialistic turn-of-the-twentieth-century American children’s authors. Yet, she remains understudied and virtually unknown, except among a few scholars who have examined, briefly, a few of her most prominent texts. Given Wade’s current popularity within certain Christian Evangelical homeschooling circles, and the resurgence of imperialist and othering discourses as part of the War on Terror, revealing her project and understanding its messages and relevance for the twenty-first century, is today all the more urgent.
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Tanfer Emin Tunc is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. She holds a PhD in American History from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and specializes in American social and cultural history, women’s studies, and transnational American studies. She has published extensively on women writers and children’s literature. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Foreign Literature Studies, Journal of Women’s History, Southern Literary Journal, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is currently the Vice President of the American Studies Association of Turkey and a Board Member of the European Association for American Studies.
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Tunc, T.E. Manifest Destiny’s Child: Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade and the Literature of American Empire. Child Lit Educ 48, 245–261 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9280-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9280-8