Abstract
Cultural studies of these material objects offer insight into the lived rehearsal of cultural norms and values.3 In their edited collection Girls, Boys, Books, Toys (1999) Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret Higonnet have chosen essays by children's literature and culture scholars whose "exciting approaches to cultural texts suggest new approaches to literary texts as well" (6-7). Puzzling placed users in a powerful position in relation to the world, fostering what Roderick McGillis has called "a colonial mentality" (xxii), charging children with the responsibility of assembling the diverse pieces of the world into a comprehensible whole through a uniform methodology; pieces, after all, are not interchangeable, and there can be only one correct way to make them fit together.5 The first puzzles, called "dissected maps," were marketed to schools in publishers' catalogs; in such a setting, as well as in private nurseries and playrooms, the puzzles could have served as imperial heuristics, teaching tools through which the meaning of imperial power could be made manifest.