This collection of literary and historical criticism draws on recent scholarship on canon formation, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and national/foreign operated in nineteenth-century children's literature, and explores how this literature transmitted hegemonic notions of American citizenship and cultural values.

Part 1 Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls; Chapter 1 A Just, A Useful Part : Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth's Companion, Lorinda B. Cohoon; Chapter 2 Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Stories, Monika Elbert; Chapter 3 Hints Dropped Here and There: Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I, Janet Gray, Melissa Fowler; Chapter 4 One extra little girl: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Orphans, Roxanne Harde; Part 2 Politicizing Children: Normalization and the Place of the Marginalized Child; Chapter 5 A is an Abolitionist: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy, Martha L. Sledge; Chapter 6 Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott's Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America, Jeannette Barnes, Lessels Eric Sterling; Chapter 7 I am your slave for love: Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Fiction for Children, Lesley Ginsberg; Chapter 8 Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford's Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories, Rita Bode; Part 3 Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood; Chapter 9 Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America, Shawn Thomson; Chapter 10 The cleverest children's book written here: Elizabeth Stoddard's Lolly Dinks's Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions, Maria Holmgren Troy; Chapter 11 A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era Writers, Melanie Dawson; Chapter 12 The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child's Garden, Anne Lundin; Part Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child's Mind; Chapter 13 Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop: Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850-1900, Eric S. Hintz; Chapter 14 Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association, J.D. Stahl; Chapter 15 Good Masters: Child-Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall, Joan Menefee; Chapter 16 Child Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child Psychology, Holly Blackford;