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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 48, Issue 3, pp 245–261 | Cite as

Manifest Destiny’s Child: Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade and the Literature of American Empire

  • Tanfer Emin Tunc
Original Paper
First Online:

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.

Keywords

Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade Our Little Cousins United States Empire Imperialism Theodore Roosevelt 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of American Culture and Literature, Faculty of LettersHacettepe UniversityAnkaraTurkey

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