ABSTRACT
It is only by contrivance that we can divide what is a seamless thread and declare some arbitrary episode the Alpha—the moment when children's literature began in the USA. Were the legends and oral stories of its aboriginal peoples (Indians or Native Americans) the first stories? If Ernesto Rodríguez—a Spanish soldier stationed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1625–told his daughter an anecdote from Don Quixote, would that be the first children's tale? Even if America's early history is reckoned by the fact that it was an English colony, and even if the search for an origin is limited to stories in print, it is difficult to discover a discrete beginning because, along with shiploads of furniture and material goods of all kinds, religious refugees and spiritual colonists brought with them or had imported texts of all kinds—English chapbooks, alphabet books, books of manners, Isaac Watts's poems, the fairy tales of Perrault, the fables of Aesop, stories of Cock Robin and Dick Whittington, etc.
