¹ Schwebel, Sara L., “Childhood Studies Meets Early America,” Early American Literature 50, no. 1 (2015): 141–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similar observations are discussed in Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar. This essay follows many scholars of American childhood who see twenty as, very roughly, a cutoff point for historical inquiry. With some exceptions, twenty-one has usually signaled the formal entry into adulthood. The article elects not to finely parse the term “child” in an effort to display various scholars’ diverse use and deployment of the term. There are, of course, gradations within that span (infancy, adolescence, etc.), and experiential differences dependent upon factors such as race and gender, but time and space constraints necessitate that these be downplayed in favor of a broader overview. On terminology and the age of majority, see Chudacoff, Howard P., How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1989)Google Scholar. An important statement on the field is in Honeck, Mischa and Rosenberg, Gabriel, “Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (April 2014): 233–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Mintz, Steven, “Why the History of Childhood Matters,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 5, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 15–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 22. On childhood and the enlargement of what constitutes politics, see Berghel, Susan Eckelmann, Fieldston, Sara, and Renfro, Paul M., eds., Growing Up America: Youth and Politics Since 1945 (Athens, GA, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Apol, Laura, “Shooting Bears, Saving Butterflies: Ideology of the Environment in Gibson's ‘Herm and I’ (1894) and Klass's California Blue (1994),” Children's Literature 31, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 90–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 90. On children and adult quests for young people's “consent,” see Weikle-Mills, Courtney, Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868 (Baltimore, 2013)Google Scholar. For youth influence over the media they consume, see Cassidy, Margaret, Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations (New York, 2018)Google Scholar.

⁴ McCabe, James Jr., Planting the Wilderness; or, The Pioneer Boys: A Story of Frontier Life (Boston, 1875), 1Google Scholar. On Indian affairs as diplomacy, see DeLay, Brian, “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 5 (Nov. 2015): 927–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On settler colonial children's literature, see Rouleau, Brian, “How the West Was Fun: Children's Literature and Frontier Mythmaking Toward the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Western Historical Quarterly (forthcoming, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ For the War of 1898, see Rouleau, Brian, “Childhood's Imperial Imagination: Edward Stratemeyer's Fiction Factory and the Valorization of American Empire,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 4 (Oct. 2008): 479–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On World War I in children's literature, see Honeck, Mischa, “Playing on Uncle Sam's Team: American Childhoods During World War I,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, no. 4 (Oct. 2018): 677–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pulp fiction is covered in Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), 217–239CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shanon Fitzpatrick, “Pulp Empire: Macfadden Publications, Transnational America, and the Global Popular (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2013). On the interwar era, see Caroline Lieffers, “Empires of Play and Publicity in Putnam's, G.P. ‘Boys’ Books by Boys,’” Diplomatic History 43, no. 1 (Jan. 2019): 31–56Google Scholar, here 33. For the WPA, see Grieve, Victoria, “The Visual Production of Citizenship: Children's Literature of the Works Progress Administration, 1937–1942,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 26–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haas, Britt, Fighting Authoritarianism: American Youth Activism in the 1930s (New York, 2018)Google Scholar. Caroline Levander discusses several crucial international events (the Revolution, the U.S.-Mexico War, the Civil War, and the War of 1898) as they unfolded in children's literature in Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Durham, NC, 2006). The Civil War, though outside the scope of this article, was of course also generative of children's discourse. See, for example, Marten, James, The Children's Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998)Google Scholar and Marten, James, ed., Children and Youth During the Civil War Era (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Stratemeyer quoted in Johnson, Deidre, Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (New York, 1993), 78Google Scholar. Stratemeyer's dependence upon adolescent fan mail in crafting his stories is discussed in “Newark Author, Great Favorite with Young Folks, Talks of Stories for Boys,” folder clippings Re: E. Stratemeyer, 1906–1927, box 319, Stratemeyer Syndicate Records, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

⁷ Parents’ Magazine quoted in Selig, Diana, “World Friendship: Children, Parents, and Peace Education in America Between the Wars,” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed., Marten, James (New York, 2002), 135–46Google Scholar, here 135. On the broader push toward internationalism in children's literature, see Selig, Diana, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar; Kimball, Melanie A., “Seeing the World from Main Street: Early Twentieth Century Juvenile Collections about Life in Other Lands,” Library Trends 60, no. 4 (Spring 2012): 675–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Threlkeld, Megan, “Education for Pax Americana: The Limits of Internationalism in Progressive Era Peace Education,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Nov. 2017): 515–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Osborne, Kenneth, “Creating the ‘International Mind’: The League of Nations Attempts to Reform History Teaching, 1920–1939,” History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 2 (May 2016): 213–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zeiger, Susan, “The Schoolhouse vs. the Armory: U.S. Teachers and the Campaign Against Militarism in the Schools, 1914-1918,” Journal of Women's History 15, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 150–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barker, Jani L., “‘A Really Big Theme’: Americanization and World Peace—Internationalism and/as Nationalism in Lucy Fitch Perkins's Twins Series,” in Internationalism in Children's Series, eds., Sands-O'Connor, Karen and Frank, Marietta (New York, 2014), 76–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Marietta A. Frank, “‘A Bit of Life Actually Lived in a Foreign Land’: Internationalism as World Friendship in Children's Series,” in ibid., 96–106; Andrew McNally, “Empire Imaginary: International Understanding and Progressive Education in the United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2017). For similar themes regarding the importance of shaping young minds, see DuRocher, Kristina, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington, KY, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the League of Nations’ children's programs, see Marshall, Dominique, “The Construction of Children as an Object of International Relations: The Declaration of Children's Rights and the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Nations, 1900–1924,” The International Journal of Children's Rights 7, no. 2 (1999): 103–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Considering their cultural ubiquity, comic books have received too little attention from historians. But some of the better treatments include Wright, Bradford W., Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar; Gabilliet, Jean-Paul, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (Jackson, MS, 2010)Google Scholar; Savage, William W. Jr., Comic Books and America, 1945–1954 (Norman, OK, 1990)Google Scholar; York, Chris and York, Rafiel, eds., Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946–1962: Essays on the Graphic Treatment of Communism, the Code and Social Concerns (Jefferson, NC, 2012)Google Scholar; Hajdu, David, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Murray, Christopher, Champions of the Oppressed? Superhero Comics, Popular Culture, and Propaganda in America During World War II (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; Goodnow, Trischa and Kimble, James J., eds., The Ten-Cent War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II (Jackson, MS, 2017)Google Scholar. For data on comic book readership, see Wright, Comic Book Nation, 58 and 155.

⁹ “Captain Marvel and the American Century,” Captain Marvel Adventures no. 110 (July 1950). On the working relationship between the comic book industry and U.S. war planners, see Hirsch, Paul, “‘This Is Our Enemy’: The Writers’ War Board and Representations of Race in Comic Books, 1942–1945,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 3 (2014): 448–486CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ “Backyard Battleground,” Daring Confessions no. 6 (Jan. 1953); “Your Role in the Cold War,” Battlefield Action no. 48 (Sept. 1962); Grieve, Victoria M., Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s (New York, 2018), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is interesting to note how many prominent policy makers felt the need to publish for children. Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, published an illustrated guide to treaty making for young people. Edward C. Butler, an ambassador to Mexico, circulated an “explainer” on that country's culture, not to mention the regular appearance of Cold War diplomats in the pages of comic books. See Lodge, Henry Cabot, How Treaties Are Made (Boston, 1899)Google Scholar and Butler, Edward C., Our Little Mexican Cousin (Boston, 1905)Google Scholar. On government-issued comics, see Strömberg, Fredrik, Comic Art Propaganda (New York, 2010)Google Scholar and Graham, Richard L., Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s–2000s (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Helgren, Jennifer, American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War (New Brunswick, NJ, 2017), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mickenberg, Julia L., Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (New York, 2006), 7, 15, 176–7Google Scholar. See also Lurie, Alison, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature (Boston, 1990)Google Scholar; Jenkins, Henry, “No Matter How Small: The Democratic Imagination of Doctor Seuss,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, eds., Jenkins, Henry, McPherson, Tara, and Shattuc, Jane (Durham, NC, 2002), 187–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On girls and foreign relations more broadly, see Helgren, Jennifer and Vasconcellos, Colleen, eds., Girlhood: A Global History (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar; Ann Abate, And Michelle, Raising Your Kids Right: Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar.

¹² Bunting, Eve, The Wall (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; White, Ellen Emerson, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Brown, Jackie, Little Cricket (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. Children's literature in Vietnam itself, meanwhile, has been far more explicit and comprehensive in its coverage of the conflict. See Dror, Olga, Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965–1975 (Cambridge, MA, 2019)Google Scholar. For an overview of the changes described here, see Mickenberg, Julia L. and Vallone, Lynne, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹³ Quote from Stead, W. T., The Americanization of the World (New York, 1901), 385Google Scholar. See also Stratton, Clif, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Berkeley, CA, 2016), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Navarro, José-Manuel, Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898–1908 (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Willinsky, John, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End (Minneapolis, MN, 1999)Google Scholar; Elson, Ruth M., Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth-Century (Lincoln, NE, 1964)Google Scholar; Angulo, A. J., Empire and Education: A History of Greed and Goodwill from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zimmerman, Jonathan, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moral, Solsiree Del, Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952 (Madison, WI, 2013)Google Scholar; Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah, “‘We Were All Robinson Crusoes’: American Women Teachers in the Philippines,” Women's Studies 41, no. 4 (2012): 372–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah, “‘It Gave Us Our Nationality’: U.S. Education, the Politics of Dress, and Transnational Filipino Student Networks, 1901–1945,” in Miescher, Stephan F. et al. , eds., Gender, Imperialism, and Global Exchanges (New York, 2015), 181–204Google Scholar; Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah, Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (Cambridge, UK, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fannie Hsu, “Colonial Articulations: English Instruction and the ‘Benevolence’ of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898–1916” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2013); and Adrianne Marie Francisco, “From Subjects to Citizens: American Colonial Education and Philippine Nation-Making, 1900–1934” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2015).

¹⁴ On Indian education, see Cahill, Cathleen, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011)Google Scholar; Jacobs, Margaret D., White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 2009)Google Scholar; and Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence, KS, 1995)Google Scholar. An early observer of territorial and overseas education was Williams, Walter L., “United States Indian Policy and the Debate Over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (Mar. 1980): 810–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other important studies include Paulet, Anne, “‘To Change the World’: The Use of American Indian Education in the Philippines,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 2 (May 2007): 173–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sarah D. Manekin, “Spreading the Empire of Free Education, 1865–1905” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2009); Coloma, Roland Sintos, “Empire: An Analytical Category for Educational Research,” Educational Theory 63, no. 6 (Dec. 2013): 639–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coloma, Roland Sintos, “‘Destiny Has Thrown the Negro and the Filipino Under the Tutelage of America’: Race and Curriculum in the Age of Empire,” Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2009): 495–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roland Sintos Coloma, “Empire and Education: Filipino Schooling under U.S. Rule, 1900–1910” (Ph.D. Diss., Ohio State University, 2004); Epstein, Erwin H., “The Peril of Paternalism: The Imposition of Education on Cuba by the United States,” American Journal of Education 96, no. 1 (Nov. 1987): 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Go, Julian, “Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (April 2000): 333–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Peace Corps, see Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ On foreign relations and domestic education, see Mickenberg, Learning from the Left, ch. 6; Brown, JoAnne, “‘A Is for Atom, B Is for Bomb’: Civil Defense in American Public Education, 1948–1963,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 68–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartman, Andrew, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dow, Peter B., Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era (Cambridge, MA, 1991)Google Scholar. On Cold War internationalism, see McNally, “Empire Imaginary.” For student exchange programs and “study abroad,” see Scribner, Campbell F., “American Teenagers, Educational Exchange, and Cold War Politics,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Nov. 2017): 542–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kramer, Paul A., “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 5 (Nov. 2009): 775–806CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bu, Liping, Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (Westport, CT, 2003)Google Scholar; and Walton, Whitney, Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970 (Palo Alto, CA, 2010)Google Scholar. Peacock, Margaret, “Samantha Smith in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Peace and the Politics of Childhood in the Late Cold War,” Diplomatic History 43, No. 3 (June 2019): 418–444CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Robert D. Dean posits the importance of elite academies in perpetuating particular Cold War assumptions in Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001).

¹⁶ Girl Scouts quoted in the Girl Scouts Handbook (New York, 1953), 207. On the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and global affairs, see Honeck, Mischa, Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Ithaca, NY, 2018)Google Scholar; Jordan, Benjamin, Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Susan A., Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007)Google Scholar; Chatelain, Marcia, “International Sisterhood: Cold War Girl Scouts Encounter the World,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (April 2014): 261–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alexander, Kristine, Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (Vancouver, 2017)Google Scholar; and Helgren, Jennifer, “‘Homemaker Can Include the World’: Female Citizenship and Internationalism in the Postwar Camp Fire Girls,” in Girlhood: A Global History, eds., Helgren, Jennifer and Vasconcellos, Colleen (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010), 304–22Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Malkki, Liisa, “Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace,” in In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, eds., Feldman, Ilana and Ticktin, Miriam (Durham, NC, 2010), 58–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Important insights along these lines are also located in Honeck, Our Frontier Is the World, especially 1–18; Dubinsky, Karen, “Children, Ideology, and Iconography: How Babies Rule the World,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 5, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 5–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brocklehurst, Helen, Who's Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict, and International Relations (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Emily S., “Rescuing Women and Children,” Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (Sept. 2002): 456–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burman, Erica, “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies,” Disasters 18, no.3 (Oct. 1994): 238–53CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. UN in Black, Maggie, Children First: The Story of UNICEF, Past and Present (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. Some even trace the emergence of the history of childhood as a field to the 1989 promulgation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet fixation on the UN is arguably dismissive of important precedents set by the League of Nations. See Marshall, Dominique, “The Formation of Childhood as an Object of International Relations: The Child Welfare Committee and the Declaration of Children's Rights of the League of Nations,” International Journal of Children's Rights 7, no. 2 (1999): 103–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On human rights more broadly, see Bradley, Mark, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁹ “Good Things for Everyland Readers,” Everyland: A World Friendship Magazine for Boys and Girls 7, no. 1 (1916). On evangelical children's periodicals, see Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, “Raising Empires Like Children: Race, Nation, and Religious Education,” American Literary History 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 399–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Christian youth internationalism, see Tyrrell, Ian, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Copeland, Jeffrey C. and Xu, Yan, eds., The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict During the World Wars (Lanham, MD, 2018)Google Scholar; Macleod, David I., Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison, WI, 1983)Google Scholar; and Thompson, Michael G., For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the National Council of Churches, see Selig, Americans All, 114–5 and Luhr, Eileen, “Cold War Teenitiative: American Evangelical Youth and the Developing World in the Early Cold War,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 295–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 295. Moslener, Sara, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 75. On missionaries and their children, see Hollinger, David A., Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Schulz, Joy, Hawaiian By Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific (Lincoln, NE, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ On World War II youth mobilization, see Tuttle, William M., “Daddy's Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (New York, 1993)Google Scholar and Ossian, Lisa L., The Forgotten Generation: American Children and World War II (Columbia, MO, 2011)Google Scholar. On youth in the occupation zones, see Zahra, Tara, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families After World War II (Cambridge, MA, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Lynne, In the Children's Best Interests: Unaccompanied Children in American Occupied Germany, 1945–1952 (Toronto, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grossmann, Atina, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poiger, Uta, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, CA, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bennett, Judith A. and Wanhalla, Angela, eds., Mother's Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen (Honolulu, HI, 2016)Google Scholar) For postwar relief efforts, see Fieldston, Sara, “Little Cold Warriors: Child Sponsorship and International Affairs,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (April 2014): 240–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 242. On 4-H programs for the world's rural youth, see Rosenberg, Gabriel N., The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 191.

²¹ On International child welfare and adoption, see Fieldston, Sara, Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century (Cambridge, MA, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dubinsky, Karen, Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oh, Arissa H., To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Palo Alto, CA, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Briggs, Laura, Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marre, Diana and Briggs, Laura, eds., International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balcom, Karen, The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972 (Toronto, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, CA, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Transnational politics of pity” in Lisa Cartwright, “Images of Waiting Children,” in Briggs, Cultures of Transnational Adoption, 185–212. On Operation Babylift, see Varzally, Allison, Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sachs, Dana, The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (Boston, 2010)Google Scholar. On Operation Pedro Pan, see Torres, Maria, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future (Boston, 2004)Google Scholar; Triay, Victor Andres, Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children's Program (Gainesville, FL, 1999)Google Scholar; and Bradford, Anita Casavantes, The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959–1962 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014)Google Scholar. But it is also important to acknowledge that child sponsorship efforts were not Cold War inventions. They represent extensions of settler colonial acculturation programs, which placed Indian children in white households. See Peterson, Dawn, Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Cambridge, MA, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Jacobs, Margaret D., “Seeing Like a Settler Colonial State,” Modern American History 1, no. 2 (July 2018): 257–270CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² The starting point for so much of this work is Tyler, Elaine May's seminal Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Stephens, Sharon, “Nationalism, Nuclear Policy, and Children in Cold War America,” Childhood 4, no. 1 (Feb. 1997): 103–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 112; McEnaney, Laura, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 89; Holt, Marilyn Irvin, Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Lawrence, KS, 2014)Google Scholar; and Alvah, Donna, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965 (New York, 2007), 198–9Google Scholar. Foley, Michael S., Dear Dr. Spock: Letters About the Vietnam War to America's Favorite Baby Doctor (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Sammond, Nicholas, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC, 2005)Google Scholar; and Watts, Steven, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbia, MO, 1997)Google Scholar. On the “Century of the Child,” see Mintz, Huck's Raft, 372–3.

²³ Numerous scholars have identified this issue. Particularly helpful to me has been Honeck and Rosenberg, “Transnational Generations”; and Fass, Paula, “Intersecting Agendas: Children in History and Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (April 2014): 294–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Examples of this sort of research include (but are not limited to) Berghel, Susan Eckelmann, “‘What My Generation Makes of America’: American Youth Citizenship, Civil Rights Allies, and the 1960s Black Freedom Struggle,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 422–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elliott, Cara A., “‘We Should Live Like One World’: White Children Write About Race and Brotherhood in Letters to Harry S. Truman,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 402–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rouleau, Brian, “‘In Praise of Trash’: Series Fiction Fan Mail and the Challenges of Children's Devotion,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 403–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Art for World Friendship, see Grieve, Little Cold Warriors, ch. 2. For fan mail to superheroes, see Wright, Comic Book Nation, 222–3.

²⁵ Missouri teenager quoted in Helgren, American Girls and Global Responsibility, 1. For high school newspapers, see Scheibach, Michael, Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945–1955 (Jefferson, NC, 2003)Google Scholar; and Graham, Gael, Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest (DeKalb, IL, 2006)Google Scholar. Fass, Paula analyzes college newspapers during the interwar years in The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Given the significance and sheer number of amateur newspapers, it is striking how little has been published on the subject. But see Spencer, Truman J., The History of Amateur Journalism (New York, 1957)Google Scholar; Petrik, Paula, “The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870–1886,” in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescence, 1850–1950, ed. West, Elliott and Petrik, Paula (Lawrence, KS, 1992): 125–42Google Scholar; Cohen, Lara Langer, “‘The Emancipation of Boyhood’: Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press,” Common-place 14, no. 1 (Fall 2013)Google Scholar; and Jessica Isaac, “Compliant Circulation: Children's Writing, American Periodicals, and Public Culture, 1839–1882” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2015).

²⁷ Jobs, Richard Ivan, Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (Chicago, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patton, Raymond A., Punk Crisis: The Global Punk Rock Revolution (New York, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mohr, Tim, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York, 2018)Google Scholar. On youth music and “rock ’n’ roll diplomacy” more generally, see Fosler-Lussier, Danielle, Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy (Oakland, CA, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For camps, see Mishler, Paul C., Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; and Honeck, Our Frontier Is the World. On transnational youth activism, see Suri, Jeremi, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar; Carey, Elaine, Protests in the Streets: 1968 Across the Globe (Cambridge, MA, 2016)Google Scholar; Klimke, Martin, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar; Schweinitz, Rebecca de, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011)Google Scholar; and Jobs, Richard Ivan, “Youth Movements: Travel, Protest, and Europe in 1968,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (Apr. 2009): 376–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bryan William Nicholson, “Apprentices to Power: The Cultivation of American Youth Nationalism, 1935–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2012), 11–12, argues that Youth and Government (among other forums) provided an important apprenticeship for young people seeking a future in government service.

²⁸ For Cold War play, see Cross, Gary, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA, 1997)Google Scholar; Ogata, Amy Fumiko, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacobson, Lisa, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Chudacoff, Howard P., Children at Play: An American History (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; and Engelhardt, Tom, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, 1994), 81–6Google Scholar. Cold War toys and card games are also referenced in Kordas, Ann Marie, The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America (London, 2013)Google Scholar. For overseas toy drives, see Fieldston, Raising the World, 110–1; Rhodes, Joel P., Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee: The Sixties in the Lives of American Children (Columbia, MO, 2017)Google Scholar; and Rhodes, , The Vietnam War in American Childhood (Athens, GA, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another example using oral histories, see O'Brien, , “‘Mama, Are We Going to Die?’: America's Children Confront the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed., Marten, James (New York, 2002), 75–86Google Scholar.

²⁹ On Cold War children's and teenagers’ television and movie culture, see, for example, Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture; Medovoi, Leerom, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fitzgerald, Michael Ray, “The White Savior and His Junior Partner: The Lone Ranger and Tonto on Cold War Television (1949–1957),” Journal of Popular Culture 46, no. 1 (2013): 79–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kordas focuses on educational short films about communism and containment produced for classroom use in The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America. Video games (and Reagan's particular interest in them) are described in Caldicott, Helen, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (New York, 1984)Google Scholar. There is some coverage of children's radio shows in MacDonald, J. Fred, Don't Touch That Dial! Radio Programming in American Life from 1920–1960 (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar, but an in-depth examination is still begging to be written.

³⁰ Alice Martin quoted in Johnson-Feelings, Dianne, ed., The Best of the Brownies’ Book (New York, 1995), 26Google Scholar. Hughes and Bontemps are discussed in Mickenberg, Learning from the Left, 79–82. See also Smith, Katharine Capshaw, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, IN, 2004)Google Scholar.

³¹ Bhabha, Jacqueline and Schmidt, Susan, “Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in the United States,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 126–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bhabha, Jacqueline, Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age (Princeton, NJ, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soto, Lilia, Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration (New York, 2018)Google Scholar; Tabak, Jana, The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress (Athens, GA, 2019)Google Scholar. On the impact of globalization among children, see Fass, Paula S., Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. More recent models for the integration of “foreign” children into U.S. history narratives include Peacock, Margaret, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dror, Making Two Vietnams. Bradford, Anita Casavantes, “‘La Niña Adorada del Mundo Socialista’: The Politics of Childhood and U.S.-Cuba-USSR Relations, 1959–1962,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 2 (2016): 296–326CrossRefGoogle Scholar, correctly observes that “this new conversation about children in international relations continues to be largely U.S. and (western) Eurocentric,” 300. The most comprehensive attempt to tackle this problem of “the West” versus “the rest” is Stearns, Peter N., Childhood in World History (New York, 2011)Google Scholar, but see also Olsen, Stephanie, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² On children and the replication of U.S. power structures, see Block, James E., The Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing and the Forging of Liberal Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012)Google Scholar. On compliance, see Isaac, “Compliant Circulation”; Miller, Susan A., “Assent as Agency in the Early Years of the Children of the American Revolution,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 48–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gleason, Mona, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 446–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ On the rise of the “precious” or “sheltered” child, see the older but very good overview by Zelizer, Viviana A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.