It was the covers that drew me in first.
An oval painting of a young girl in a white bonnet, staring pensively down at the bottom-right corner of the book, lays over an image of a boat leaning precariously toward the surface of the water. A forest green ribbon peeks out from where it is tucked into the pages’ deckled edges. The text on the hardcover advertises that this book, A Journey to the New World, is the diary of Remember Patience Whipple, who wrote in on the Mayflower in the year 1620. She is the only author listed on the cover.
The book was beautiful. It felt special, intimate; when I picked it up, I really felt like I was diving into a girl’s true account of sailing the open seas, making that treacherous trek from England to what she considered “the New World” (though it was hardly new to the millions of people who lived there already).
From there, I — and by all accounts, millions of other young readers — devoured the 35 books that followed in the initial 1996 release of the Dear America series. Dear America was composed of fictional diaries from young girls throughout American history; its companion series, The Royal Diaries, featured the daily musings of young royals, such as Queen Elizabeth I of England, the medieval Eleanor of Aquitane, and Nzingha Mbande, queen of the 16th-century Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present day Angola. These books spawned a new generation of young history fanatics and child readers of historical fiction. I talked to 17 now-adults who, as children, were devoted readers of the Dear America and Royal Diaries series, many of whom so cherished these books that they went on to pursue careers in history or writing.
Though once immensely popular, these now mostly discontinued novels were a cultural touchstone of the early aughts because of how they made history engaging and personal in a way that traditional history classes and texts — which favor the actions of white men, wars, and large, abstract-seeming events — don’t.
Most importantly, they showed young readers — primarily girls — that they contributed to the tides of history, and that their stories mattered.
I loved that they told stories I'd never heard of or only heard about through one sentence in a textbook at school,” says Meg Conley, 36, a writer based in Denver, Colorado. Conley says she felt “completely disconnected” from her elementary school’s history education, which was frustrating, because she has always loved the subject. The Dear America novels, however, taught her about the critical histories of girlhood — and oppression — that were left out of class.