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Drawing on visual and documentary evidence, the study argues that the toys operated as interactive pedagogy about Arctic imperial possibilities and limits, shaping ideas of race, authenticity, and citizenship. A case study examines the Boston Children’s Museum set and its European production and export.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/frozen-in-time-teaching-imperialism-through-lead-toys-in-interwar-america/592006/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/frozen-in-time-teaching-imperialism-through-lead-toys-in-interwar-america/592006.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Mabel","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-29","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":39},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"What argument does Anne Boyd make about the “Escimo” lead toys?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"The toys are argued to function as interactive education that taught children about the possibilities and limits of Arctic imperialism while shaping notions of race, authenticity, and citizenship.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How were the Escimo figurines used in teaching history?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Educators treated the figurines as pedagogical tools for young children during the interwar period, as part of a broader series called New Ways of Teaching History.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"Where were the Escimo toys produced and how did they reach the United States?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Although intended to educate U.S. children about Inuit communities, the set was produced in Europe and exported through Gustav R. Julien of Hamburg, Germany.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},592006,1792191066,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":39,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145,"preview_page_count":4},7971474920318,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/74000ee537e6b0ca360?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1788430171632181674","Frozen in Time  \nTeaching Imperialism through Lead Toys in Interwar America  \n•  \nAnne Boyd  \nThe author argues that, in the early 1920s, many urban White Americans saw in the Arctic an escape from a world of rapidly expanding technology and became captivated by images of Inuit communities. To pass down an antimodernist form of imperialism to children of the period, educators used lead ethnographic “Escimo” figurines, which rendered Inuit communities as relics of the past. Drawing on visual and documentary evidence, she holds that these ethnographic toys functioned as a form of interactive education that taught young American children about the potential possibilities, as well as limits, of Arctic imperialism. She discusses these toy sets as pedagogical tools and how they helped convey ideas about race, authenticity, and citizenship. Keywords: empire; Indigenous; Inuit; material culture; visual culture  \nIntroduction  \nThe Boston Children’s Museum currently holds a set of ethnographic figurines, composed of lead, that shaped American understandings of imperialism as well as the development of Indigenous communities. The figurines, labeled “No. 71: Escimo Life,” worked as a form of interactive education for young children during the period between World War I and World War II as part ofa larger series entitled New Ways of Teaching History.1 While the toy set intended to teach children in the United States about Inuit communities in the Arctic, the “Escimo” set was produced in Europe and exported through Gustav R. Julien of Hamburg, Germany.2 Hand painted and thin, the toys render Inuit people as collectively frozen in time, becoming nostalgic reminders of an imagined past within a rapidly changing world.  \nDespite their makers’ promise that these toys offered a new way of teaching history, the figurines also provided an object lesson in antimodernism, inviting  \n267  \nAmerican Journal of Play, volume 16, numbers 2 and 3 © 2024 The Strong [Contact Anne Boyd at aeboyd@bu.edu](Contact Anne Boyd at aeboyd@bu.edu)  \nstudents to seek inspiration from societies that were perceived to be primitive by elite White Americans. Literary critic Shari Hundorf has argued that the Arctic provided a powerful source of inspiration for urban Americans and Europeans seeking better ways of living after World War I and that it “augmented the modernist suspicion of progress (a primary rationale for colonial domination) and technology.” 3 This antimodernist impulse was not entirely new—it was rooted in the discourse of overcivilization at the turn of the century, whose proponents argued that urban residents of the Western world were increasingly detached from their own elemental nature. The reported closure of the American frontier in 1892 led prominent figures like future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to seek out new models to help cultivate a renewed form of rugged masculinity, one inspired by non-Westerners and their relationship to wild, natural landscapes.4 This discourse expanded exponentially in the interwar years in the wake of immense technological change shaping the realm of warfare and beyond. These figurines demonstrate the efforts of the many middle-to upper-class White Americans and Europeans who worked against this tide of change, striving topreserve a world that they believed was in danger of going extinct. A piece of this type of preservation came in the form of the collection of cultures through art, objects, and photographs as a means to own and control them. These toys function as a component of such a practice of collection, because the repetitive nature of the figurines meant that their users—whether they be children or adults—would have literally compiled them together, and, as we will see, this compilation inherently involved a level of control.  \nThese Escimo toys suggest that a key piece of this interwar, antimodernist impulse was both a passing down of an idealized vision of Inuit people, which rendered them as communitie","cbCairiLStfTmsz9","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCairiLStfTmsz9","pdf",255003,21,"English","# Introduction\n## Ethnographic figurines and interactive education\n## Antimodernism, primitivism, and preservation\n## Imagined Inuit representation vs. lived realities","[{\"question\":\"What argument does Anne Boyd make about the “Escimo” lead toys?\",\"answer\":\"The toys are argued to function as interactive education that taught children about the possibilities and limits of Arctic imperialism while shaping notions of race, authenticity, and citizenship.\"},{\"question\":\"How were the Escimo figurines used in teaching history?\",\"answer\":\"Educators treated the figurines as pedagogical tools for young children during the interwar period, as part of a broader series called New Ways of Teaching History.\"},{\"question\":\"Where were the Escimo toys produced and how did they reach the United States?\",\"answer\":\"Although intended to educate U.S. children about Inuit communities, the set was produced in Europe and exported through Gustav R. Julien of Hamburg, Germany.\"}]","Frozen in Time - Teaching Imperialism through Lead Toys in Interwar America | PDF",1792073662,53]