Empire has been one of the most fertile fields in the study of American history. Whether William Appleman Williams arguing that empire is the American way of life, or Julie Green investigating how canal builders expanded the American empire in Panama, or Daniel Immerwahr demonstrating how the United States hides its empire, there is no question that empire has provided an analytical tool for historians of the United States to ask new historical questions while de-exceptionalizing American history. However, for all the ink that has been spilled interrogating how Americans have championed or challenged their empire, especially since 1898, little work has been done showing how the imperialist mindset passed from generation to generation. In his book, Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century, Brian Rouleau begins to address this shortcoming by studying how literature naturalized American imperialism for the country’s youngest citizens. Rouleau also shows, however, that literature did more than simply shape adolescent imperialists: By exercising their power as consumers, young Americans spoke back to the empire and influenced the course of twentieth-century American history.

Rouleau begins by examining how books aimed at young people popularized and essentialized settler colonialism in the American West after the Civil War. “Expansionist policies,” Rouleau reminds us, “did not simply need to be promulgated; they needed to be made generationally durable … empires entail investment across time” (2). In the second half of the nineteenth century, the American transcontinental empire was still in need of winning and literature intended for juveniles aimed to inculcate the next generation of imperial leaders and soldiers with the duties and responsibilities they would inherit with adulthood. Rouleau demonstrates how many young Americans accepted the imperial imperative of conquering and subduing the West and its Indigenous inhabitants. Importantly, perhaps in light of a modern tendency to equate youth with dissent, such acceptance shows how young people often accept and mirror the attitudes of their elders.

Beginning in the 1890s, with the West essentially won and Native Americans largely subdued, young readers lost interest in stories of continental empire. In response, writers and publishers began producing works trumpeting the United States’ need to expand across oceans and bring the empire to foreign shores. Not for the last time, the reading habits and purchasing power of juvenile Americans dictated the imperial literature provided to them. Adults could not simply force their ideas of imperialism upon their children—the type of empire the country’s youth imagined mattered, too. The tastes and desires of young people found voice in small, self-published newspapers and newsletters produced on novelty printing presses at home. At the same time, some adults attempted to blunt the appeal of global imperialism by publishing stories aimed at encouraging a more internationalist approach to foreign relations. Again, though, by choosing to forgo such works in favor of jingoistic adventure tales set in foreign lands, young Americans demonstrated an imperial imaginary that saw the American empire as a global good.

The book concludes with an examination of the role comic books played, from the 1940s into the 1960s, in encouraging youths to imagine a world led by the United States, followed by how comic books then reflected a growing discontent among young Americans for international interventions brought about by disenchantment with the Vietnam War. The epilogue brings the book up to the present day, arguing that television and movies have largely taken the place of literature and have skewed away from messages of U.S. imperialism in favor of apolitical commercialism. While praising the messages of greater cultural acceptance, Rouleau also suggests that such television programs and movies demonstrate that Americans today suffer from a disinterest in diplomacy, to their detriment. “Though many families have abandoned the imperial nursery,” writes Rouleau, “the United States has hardly divested itself of empire. Indeed, a ‘politics of childhood’—whereby postwar American interventionism is rationalized as the selfless act of ‘child-saving’—has only fueled its growth” (231). Young Americans are no longer trained to be imperialists; they are trained to not even notice the empire.

As is so often the case with important works, Empire’s Nursery raises questions it cannot answer. The primary audience targeted by the imperial literature of the late nineteenth century—young boys—were mature adults by the 1920s and 1930s, but we rarely get to see direct connections between the imperial training of their youth and the political actions of their adulthood. The apparent disconnect between discourse and action raises questions about the larger state of historical inquiry. Are historians too focused on discourse at the expense of action? Have the lingering effects of the linguistic turn, now approaching forty years of age, led to a type of intellectual history that seeks only to explain how rhetoric and propaganda influenced the minds of young American readers in the 1890s without exploring, with specificity, how those lessons played out on the ground decades later? These are questions, however, well beyond the scope of Rouleau’s book and are questions perhaps best left to be considered as a field.

Empire’s Nursery importantly begins to show how imperial ideology is propagated across generational divides. If empire truly is a way of life, it is vital that we understand how that way of life is reproduced. Rouleau shows how the U.S. empire is culturally constructed and reconstructed across the years, rather than standing as an essentialized monolith that can only be uncritically accepted or heroically resisted. Rouleau demonstrates that the U.S. empire serves a purpose—primarily and repeatedly an economic purpose—that manifests itself in political and cultural expressions that have to be taught to and interpreted for the next generation of imperial agents (or anti-imperialist resisters). Taken as a whole, Empire’s Nursery is a significant examination of a question long neglected by historians of the U.S. empire: How did young Americans come to embrace an imperial ideology that reached global proportions? In answering this question, Rouleau reminds us that an empire, like any cultural structure, depends on its architects’ ability to sell their product to the young and on the young’s willingness to find value in and accept what they are being sold.