The following guest blog post by Mahshid Mayar, author of Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, is an edited version of an essay originally published under the title “Verbs of Violence 19th-Century Jigsaw Puzzles, Otherness, and American Childhood” in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and is reproduced with permission. In the ever-expanding market of children’s games and toys, jigsaw puzzles were among the most quickly and completely Americanized playthings that were found in the hands of well-to-do American children in the 19th...