Here is the web link from NYU Press with an amazingly fun and “imperial” cover! https://nyupress.org/9781479804474/empires-nursery/
In Empire’s Nursery, Brian’s second monograph, he argues that children’s literature in the United States has often been employed to explain the nation’s international ambitions. Examining dime novels, children’s magazines, serialized stories, pulp fiction, and comic books, Empire’s Nursery situates young people as a crucial audience for diplomatic discourse. In addition, Rouleau examines the novels, short stories, and poetry written by children themselves to suggest that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, juvenile citizens actively sought to contribute to and shape a national conversation about America’s growing global influence. The modern era has often been called both the “American Century” and the “Century of the Child.” Empire’s Nursery illustrates how those conceptualizations intertwined by depicting children in a rather influential role as the junior partners of U.S. international expansion. With chapter titles like “How the West was Fun” and “Comic Book Cold War,” Rouleau’s Empire’s Nursery will not just be an erudite examination of American cultural history and its sense of the world, but a book that causes us re-think the reading passions of our own youth with a new understanding and appreciation.
Congratulations, Brian, on this tremendous achievement!!