¹ Exercise book by Fred Swartz, 1 May 1931, Exercise Book Archive, Milan, Italy.

² See, for example, Jennifer Helgren's discussion of global responsibility cultivated through camping organizations for girls during the Cold War, which included the Camp Fire Girls, in her American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War (New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017). Heather Snell, Abbie Ventura, Katie Day Good, and Katharyne Mitchell have all made similar claims in their arguments about global-citizenship education for the young.

³ The US Office of History outlines missionary and mercantile interest in Japan on their website (see “The United States and the Opening to Japan, 1853”); for a historical account of this trade from the 1930s see William Lockwood Jr., “Japanese Silk and the American Market,” Far Eastern Survey, ed. Russell Shiman, 5, 4 (12 Feb. 1936), 31–36, American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations. As Lockwood's account suggests, the collapse of the silk market after the 1929 stock market crash dissolved one major source of trade between the United States and Japan, perhaps one reason for the focus on this along with other items of trade in Fred Swartz's exercise book.

⁴ Swartz, exercise book, 12 May 1931.

⁵ The United States–Japan “Friendship Doll Exchange,” where over one hundred blue-eyed dolls were offered to Japanese children as a token of friendship, took place in 1927 and was established by educator Dr. Sidney Lewis Culick as part of the Committee on World Friendship among Children (formed in 1926). Many of these dolls were destroyed during World War II due to anti-American sentiment, though some have survived. Archival material from this exchange is located at the Boston Public Library. For more details on this friendship exchange and images of the original dolls in their regional clothing see “Miss Kyoto and the Friendship Doll Exchange,” Boston Children's Museum, at https://japanesehouse.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/sites/default/files/resource-pdfs/True%20Story%20of%20Miss%20Kyoto.pdf (accessed 5 June 2019).

⁶ Gorman, Daniel, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Ibid., 192.

⁸ Parker, Walter, “‘International Education’ in US Public Schools,” in Andreotti, Vanessa De Oliveira, ed., The Political Economy of Global Citizenship Education (New York: Routledge, 2014), 186–90, 187Google Scholar.

⁹ Woodrow Wilson, “Fourteen Points,” speech delivered before US Congress on 8 Jan. 1918, the Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp (accessed 25 May 2021).

¹⁰ See, for example, Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, “Into the Archives of Childhood,” in Duane, Anna Mae, ed., The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Steedman, Carolyn, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Moruzi, Kristine, Musgrove, Nell, and Leahy, Carla Pascoe, “Hearing Children's Voices: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges,” in Moruzi, Musgrove, and Leahy, Pascoe, eds., Children's Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cham: Palgrave, 2019), 1–25, 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Light, Jennifer, States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., 9, emphasis mine.

¹⁴ Such challenges are raised in the more recent essay from American Quarterly by Camille Owens, which draws on black girlhood studies to “anarrange” the archive of black child prodigy Philippa Schuyler. See Owens, Camille, “‘Fine Discords’: Anarranging the Archives of Philippa Schuyler,” American Quarterly, 73, 2 (June 2021), 205–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 13Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For more on postcolonial theory in children's literature see Bradford, Clare, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Kaplan, 13.

¹⁸ See Christina Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligation: The Discourse of Adoption and the Cold War Commitment to Asia,” in Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 35–66.

¹⁹ Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 195, 198.

²⁰ Swartz, exercise book, 5 May 1931.

²¹ Ibid., 27 May 1931.

²² Ibid., 28 May 1931.

²³ Kiwanis International, Kiwanis Activities, Volume X (Chicago: Kiwanis International, 1931), 3.

²⁴ Kiwanis International, Kiwanis in Brief: A Little Book of Facts and Features for New Members, Prospective Members, Interested Friends (Chicago: Kiwanis International, 1930), 25–26.

²⁵ Ibid., 31.

²⁶ “Life in Long Winter in Little America,” Bridgeton Evening News, 6 May 1931, 3.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Swartz, exercise book, 15 May 1931.

²⁹ With Byrd at the South Pole, film, dir. Julian Johnson (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1930).

³⁰ Swartz, exercise book, 11 May 1931.

³¹ Swartz, exercise book, 12 May 1931.

³² Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3.

³³ Mike Doughty, 1930, “May Day 1930,” Old Images of Pitman NJ, Facebook, 22 Sept. 2020, at www.facebook.com/groups/595722337727182/search?q=may%20queen.

³⁴ Sandi Keller, “Annual Chinese Picnics at Alcyon Lake,” Pitman Anti-Racist Collective, 3 Dec. 2020, at https://pitman-antiracist-collective.com/news-and-stories/annual-chinese-picnics-at-alcyon-lake. The original historical newspaper referenced in this short article is “Chinamen to Have a Picnic” from the Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), 23 June 1906.

³⁵ Sandi Keller, “Carry a Couple of Guns, and Stand for No Tomfoolery,” Pitman Anti-Racist Collective, 19 Nov. 2020, at https://pitman-antiracist-collective.com/news-and-stories/carry-a-couple-of-guns-and-stand-for-no-tomfoolery. The original historical newspaper referenced in this short article is “Pitman Fussed Up over Klan Scare” from the Morning Post (Camden, NJ), 3 April 1923.

³⁶ Robert Tucker, The History of Elsmere: African American Life in Glassboro, New Jersey (Bloomington, IN: Archway Publishing, 2019), 72.

³⁷ American Indian scholar Debbie Reese draws on the metaphor coined by Rudine Sims Bishop, which viewed children's literature as a “window” and “mirror” into other children's life experiences. She adds “curtains” as a way of acknowledging the history of US imperialism and the colonial violence that was part of this history. See Reese's “Critical Indigenous Literacies: Selecting and Using Children's Books about Indigenous Peoples,” Viewpoints and Visions, 95, 6 (July 2018), 389–93.

³⁸ In his exhibit “Small Towns, Black Lives,” Wendel White explores Elsmere and other rural towns with a historic black population. Described as a “photo-text project,” it combines various media to capture the lives of members of these communities. In one of the contributions to this exhibit, White features a close-up of the chalkboard from Franklin Street School, which was established in 1928 in Cape May, New Jersey – a mere sixty miles south of Elsmere. With its marks in various phases of erasure, the chalkboard serves as an apt metaphor for the precariousness of the archival traces left behind by children, and especially from those within black communities such as this one. See Wendel White, “Small Towns, Black Lives,” Wendel White Projects, 2003, at https://wendelwhite.com/projects/small-towns-black-lives.

³⁹ Margaret E. Reade et al., The Annual Report of the Public Schools, Nutley, New Jersey, for the Year Ending June 20, 1930 (Nutley, NJ: The Nutley Sun, 1930), 31.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 65.

⁴¹ Ibid., 69.

⁴² Arthur D. Efland, “Art Education during the Great Depression,” Art Education, 36, 6 (Nov. 1983), 38–42, 40.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ See Evening Sun, 4 April 1935, 1, 4; and Evening Sun, 15 March 1935, 1, as two examples of reports about the competitions in which the school entered their “mimeographed magazine,” as described in the 15 March report. For more on the educational rationale for incorporating global education in the school see Evening Sun, 7 Dec. 1935, 7; and Evening Sun, 10 Dec. 1935, 1.

⁴⁵ “The English Walnut,” 1936, Hanover Public School District Archives, Hanover, PA, 61.

⁴⁶ US Census Bureau, 1940 United States Federal Census, generated by Ancestry.com, at www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2442/images/M-T0627-04270-00797?ssrc=&backlabel=Return&pId=17828896.

⁴⁷ Grogg's name also appears in a World War II memorial for Hanover residents. Dying in training at the age of twenty-two during a parachute accident, Grogg's life was cut short after joining the military service. See, for example, “Rites Saturday for Pvt. Jesse M. Grogg, Former Hanover Vet,” York Daily Record, 28 July 1948, 10. Additional documents confirming Grogg's identity were provided by the Hanover Area Historical Society.

⁴⁸ Jesse Grogg, “The English Walnut,” 16.

⁴⁹ “The English Walnut,” 17–18.

⁵⁰ Ibid, 36–37. The coloring on the image in Figure 4 differs from the version provided by the Hanover Area Historical Society. As “The English Walnut” was mimeographed and then distributed to students, each child colored in the illustrations in different ways. For comparison, see the digitized copy of the 1936 version of “The English Walnut” on the Archives of the Hanover Public School District website, “EHS Class of 1948 Memorabilia,” at https://www.hpsd.k12.pa.us/archives.

⁵¹ Evening Sun, 7 Dec. 1935, 7.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ In addition to the “Uncle Ben” workbooks, which introduced children to cultures from around the world through a travel-narrative format, children's books about explorations to remote regions, often written by the explorers themselves, were popular in the 1930s. These texts, including Josephine Peary's The Snow Baby (1901) and William Beebe's Exploring with Beebe (1932), tended to reproduce racist language about indigenous populations. The predominance of these texts in schools across the United States can in part be verified by the fact that they trickled down to more rural towns such as Pitman and Hanover. Indeed, in the 1937 yearbook by Walnut Street School students, the children include an entry on Admiral Byrd, who features in Swartz's exercise book as well.

⁵⁵ Katharyne Mitchell, “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, 4 (Dec. 2003), 387–403, 387–88. While Mitchell is applying the concept of the “strategic cosmopolitan” to the neoliberal context, she notes how the movement away from a “multicultural self,” where an individual was both able and willing to cooperate and interact with those who are different from them, is rooted in the educational philosophy of John Dewey, dating back as early as 1924. See ibid., 400 n. 3, for more on the philosophical roots of multicultural education, which can be linked to Diana Selig's concept of an early twentieth-century “cultural gifts” movement.

⁵⁶ See, for example, Katharine Capshaw's critique of W. E. B. Du Bois's Brownies’ Book in her essay “War, the Black Diaspora and Anti-colonialist Journalism: The Case of Our Boys and Girls,” in Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston, and Emma Short, eds., Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2016), 77–92, 81, 88. Capshaw notes that materials meant to reach the working-class child did exist, and while she does not frame this in terms of global education, the magazine she discusses, Our Boys and Girls (1919), a precursor to Du Bois's popular magazine for black children, did include news and reports of global events for working-class black children. In the October 1919 issue, young readers are informed of a revolution in India to overthrow the British, alongside other events that include a “history of the world.” See Sailendra Nath Ghose, “The Struggle for Freedom in India,” in Our Boys and Girls, ed. Anselmo Jackson, Oct. 1919, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, 4, 7; and George Wells Parker, “History,” in ibid., 2. Katie Day Good makes a similar claim, in this case in relation to global education targeted at white Americans, where she provides the example of the “traveling” museum exhibit which was used both to “bring the world to the child” and to “enlighten” working-class and immigrant children. See Katie Day Good, Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 89.

⁵⁷ “The English Walnut,” 38.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 60.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 34.

⁶⁰ Where possible, I have tracked children listed in the 1936 yearbook by examining the 1940 United States Federal Census, which gives a snapshot of the children's family life and how much and to what extent they continued their education after they finished elementary school. See US Census Bureau, 1940 United States Federal Census, generated by Ancestry.com, at www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2442/images/M-T0627-04270-00797?ssrc=&backlabel=Return&pId=17828896.

⁶¹ Reade et al., The Annual Report of the Public Schools, Nutley, 28.

⁶² Good, 170, 173.

⁶³ Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 13–14. Kaplan also underscores the importance of “anarchy” for “remap[ping] the field from broader international and transnational perspectives” and “decenter[ing] the national focus of some of the key paradigms” in American studies. Ibid., 16. While she is not considering the role of children's archives in this shift from the national to the global, as I have argued the movement of the American child between citizenship and empire provides a similar opportunity to expand the critical perspectives on US empire and the geographical framework in which it operates.

⁶⁴ While naturally as a researcher I have sought to provide a coherent narrative in this essay, I have aimed, as much as possible, to respect the interpretations of the communities connected to these materials. There are inevitably absences that occur, however. In telling the history of Pitman, I have had to remove most of my references to neighboring Elsmere, which was one of many rural black towns in New Jersey. Due to the poor conditions of black schools, which are well documented by historians, it is significantly harder to find the traces of black children's educational experiences, much less to trace how these small towns might have continued earlier global initiatives for black children, such as the frequently discussed “As the Crow Flies” section of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Brownies’ Book. In order to respect this history, I am taking the time to develop more meaningful connections with Elsmere School and those who remember teaching or being educated there for the longer version of this project, The Anarchy of Children's Archives: Children's Literature and Global Citizenship Education in the American Century, in order contribute to a more diverse history of global education in the twentieth century.