How did Ichabod Crane and other characters from children’s literature shape the ideal of American citizenship? 2015 Honor Book Award, Children's Literature Association From the colonial period to the end of the Civil War, children’s books taught young Americans how to be good citizens and gave them the freedom, autonomy, and possibility to imagine themselves as such, despite the actual limitations of the law concerning child citizenship. Imaginary Citizens argues that the origin and evolution of the concept of citizenship in the United States centrally involved struggles over the meaning and boundaries of childhood. Children were thought of as more than witnesses to American history and governance—they were representatives of “the people” in general. Early on, the parent-child relationship was used as an analogy for the relationship between England and America, and later, the president was equated to a father and the people to his children. There was a backlash, however. In order to contest the patriarchal idea that all individuals owed childlike submission to their rulers, Americans looked to new theories of human development that limited political responsibility to those with a mature ability to reason. Yet Americans also based their concept of citizenship on the idea that all people are free and accountable at every age. Courtney Weikle-Mills discusses such characters as Goody Two-Shoes, Ichabod Crane, and Tom Sawyer in terms of how they reflect these conflicting ideals.

"The five volumes of A History of American Magazines constitute a unique cultural history of America, viewed through the pages and pictures of her periodicals from the publication of the first monthly magazine in 1741 through the golden age of magazines in the twentieth century"--Page 4 of cover.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was a key writer of the revolutionary era and early U.S. republic, known for his landmark novels and other writings in a variety of genres. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents all of Brown’s non-novelistic writings—letters, political pamphlets, fictions, periodical writings, historical writings, and poety—in a seven-volume scholarly set. This series’ volumes are edited to the highest scholarly standards and will bear the seal of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions (MLA-CSE). The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, volume 3 of the series, presents a selection of Brown’s published writings between 1801 and 1807. The majority of the volume is devoted to texts that appeared in The Literary Magazine, and American Register, which Brown edited from October 1803 to December 1807, through fifty-one issues. The volume also includes a number of additional non-fiction pieces that Brown wrote during this period: a significant review essay in the 1801 American Review, and Literary Journal; a series of articles in the 1802 Port Folio; anda biographical sketch of Brown’s late brother-in-law, John Blair Linn, which was published with Linn’s book-length poem Valerian in 1805. The majority of these texts have not been in print since the early nineteenth century, and never have they been accorded this level of textual and editorial scrutiny.