A Children's History of (Native) America: The Tales of Peter Parley, about America

I hope my little readers will learn this story, so that they can tell it all without the book.

Peter Parley¹

In 1830 the Indian Removal Act passed the Jackson White House, forcing indigenous peoples of the Southeast into territories west, past the Mississippi River. The act came into being after years of legislative debates over Indian treaties, projecting onto the river all the significations of a political border–a physical division between nations and races. In one of many examples, James Barbour in a House debate in 1828 argues "that the plan of collecting the Indians on suitable lands West of the Mississippi, contains the elements of their preservation," thus embedding the river in a legal codification of removal, exclusion, and oppression.² The legal adoption of this racial boundary concretized the building anxieties surrounding a definable American identity. Americanness in this moment is best understood by what it denies and pushes "far west over the mountains" or deep into the South.³ Jacqueline Rose points to this emphasis on territory in her seminal text, The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), when she aptly notes, "in the still 'childlike' state of American civilization, history could be read directly off the land (history based on geography), whereas if you were after the cultural origins of England, then you had to dig for them."⁴ In this moment, Rose draws out a connection between the "child" nation and a readable landscape, arguing that American historical narratives are written on the surface, in plain view. There is a way in which histories for children echo in this articulation of nation and narrative: boldly didactic, laboring over a naturalized representation.

This reliance on geographies of containment and exclusion are understood as a fantasy. Native peoples endured east of the Mississippi. The contact zones created by such ideological separations complicated an already paradoxical narrative of American experience.⁵ The narrative is paradoxical in that the desire to see immaterial ideologies of white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative Americanness physically constructed requires the embodied representation of what lies outside this figuration. Taking up this unsettled national territory and unstable national identity, this essay will look to a popular children's history, uncovering a process of interpellation into a national body defined by the "material and metaphoric resonances" of racial borders.⁶ Indeed, the nuances of geographic borders and racialized identities are compounded in this study by childhood as a conceptually bordered space of extended leisure and constant development.

In 1827 Samuel G. Goodrich published the first of what was to be a wildly successful series, The Tales of Peter Parley, about America. Selling upwards of seven million copies, engaging canonical authors, and "exert[ing] immense influence over American audiences," Goodrich's Parley occupied a powerful place in the antebellum nineteenth century.⁷ In the space of twenty-seven years, he published seventy-eight books in this series, and many of them have multiple editions. By virtue of this incredible permeation in early America, these children's books are a site of significant cultural work. Indeed, when Nathaniel Hawthorne and his sister, Elizabeth, were famously compelled to write under Goodrich's name, they collaborated on Peter Parley's Universal History on the Basis of Geography (1837). Taking the job for a meager profit, "evidently, Hawthorne accepted the assignment because he regarded the work as relatively easy. In explaining the project to Elizabeth, he observed, 'It need not be superiour [sic], in profundity and polish, to the middling Magazine articles' (XV: 245)."⁸ While Hawthorne considered it a trivial project at best, Peter Parley's Universal History was quickly adopted by U.S. schools and sold over one million copies.⁹ Taken up in both schools and homes as an authority in children's education, the Peter Parley series was a common companion for American youths. The historical records indicating Peter Parley sales and the common reference to this character in the antebellum nineteenth century, including an approval by Lydia Sigourney, affirms the ubiquitous presence of these texts in children...