Things in Print Thursday :: 5 time periods/topics in American history that I learned about as a child not primarily from history class but from Dear America

Because really.  Those books, man.  Spunky historical fiction girls existing in the past.  And I was the kid who actually liked reading the historical footnotes, too.  There is next to no commentary on this list, but it’s still worth observing.

5. The Lowell mills and Irish immigrants
Courtesy o fSo Far From Home, The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1847 by Barry Denenberg.

4. Prisoners of Native Americans in the 1700s
Courtesy of Standing in the Light, The Captive Diary of Catharine Carey Logan, Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania, 1763 by Mary Pope Osborne.

3. Indian schools
Courtesy of My Heart is on the Ground, The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl, Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, 1880 by Ann Rinaldi.

2. The great railroad race
Courtesy of, well, The Great Railroad Race, The Diary of Libby West, Utah Territory, 1868 by Kristiana Gregory.

1. Coal mining camps
Courtesy of A Coal Miner’s Bride, The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, Lattimer, Pennsylvania, 1896 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.

In short: wow, the history I learned in elementary school was broad and vague.  The new Dear America line has some new titles as well as some old ones put out again, but I notice that none of these except Standing in the Light are actually among the reissues.  Hm.  These may be historical b-sides in their way, but they’re all fascinating.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: parade-induced nostalgia and researched truth

I was one of those kids who played too much with dolls.  (A sentence I cannot say now with a straight face, but hey.)  I had the Barbies, the paper dolls both purchased and punched out of the middle of American Girl Magazine (I always wanted to be one of those girls they paperdolled, but I wasn’t interesting enough [yes, even as a nine-year-old I was self-deprecating]), and the 18-inchers.  A proper American Girl doll, a Magic Attic Club doll.  For American Girls, I had Kirsten, the Swedish girl in the mid-1800s (so, basically, Sofia Metz if she had cousins and brothers and her family didn’t get slaughtered, you know); for the Magic Attic Club, I had Megan, the bookish redhead with glasses (OH MAN THE TYPECASTING.  I mean, I’m not a ginger, but I do end up being them sometimes in fiction).  And I had the books that went with them.  I don’t have every single of their respective series’, but I have a lot of them, and the rest I’d get from the library at least six times apiece.

I bring this up because watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this morning like the sap I am got me curious.  They haven’t sent me an American Girl catalogue in years (they did for far too long, hoping maybe I’d have a sister or something, I guess – and I’d always look through, because I’m just like that) so I didn’t know about the state of the collection.  I liked to think when I was little that I’d be able to pass my American Girl doll onto whatever children I ended up having (even if her left arm is falling out of the socket — they can fix that, right?) and pass the books along with her.  They weren’t great literature, they weren’t that long, but they were sweet, and good history lessons, and I enjoyed them.  (And they’re my justification for babbling about this on Thursday.)

So I opened up the American Girl website to look at the collection as it now stands.  When I was a kid, the dolls were: Felicity, Josefina (she was my second-favorite), Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, Kit, and Molly.  It was a pretty diverse bunch, you had almost all the requisites: Felicity was the feisty redheaded colonial girl, Josefina was the feisty New Mexican girl, Kirsten was the shy but still feisty Swedish immigrant girl, Addy was the feisty and smart escaped slave girl, Samantha was the proper but feisty turn-of-the-century girl, Kit was the brainy and feisty Great Depression girl, Molly was the feisty and sassy World War II girl.  (Yes, they were all feisty in their way.)  They all had good stories to tell.

The last times I got the catalogue, they were introducing dolls of some of the girls’ friends: Felicity’s bestie Elizabeth (who was shyer than her, and I know, because I played her in a ridiculous third-grade one-act production) and Samantha’s bestie Nellie (who was less affluent than her) and Kit’s bestie Ruthie (who was more polite than her) and Molly’s bestie Emily (who was more British than her [British at all]).  I was okay with that.  But then they started retiring dolls and thus retiring their stories, and adding new girls in.

Samantha and Emily were apparently the first to go.  I’m okay with that.  Their turn-of-the-century stories weren’t that special, and you can read the same kind of thing in more detail in my pet Betsy~Tacy books.  Then Kirsten was “archived,” and that makes me really sad.  Because stories about immigrants are always fun to read, especially in child-oriented historical fiction!  There’s adventure and learning and disease and travel and friendship and whimsy all in the same place.  Felicity and Elizabeth got retired, too, and that’s also a shame: the Revolutionary War is a really interesting time to read about (and the clothes are pretty, too).

They’ve still got Josefina, Addy, Kit, Ruthie, Molly, and Emily.  In addition, there’s Kaya the feisty Native American girl, Marie-Grace and Cécile the… I don’t know what, but probably feisty, interracial besties (Cécile is African-American, Marie-Grace is white) in New Orleans (in the 1800s, so the interracial thing is a big deal), Rebecca the feisty Jewish girl (she’s only ten years off of Samantha’s time period, so it’s not too different, but it’s more interesting, because “she follows her dreams in the big city”), and Julie and Ivy, the feisty interracial besties (Julie is white, Ivy is Asian… I mention these interracial things ’cause the American Girls of my youth tended to mostly hang out with like people; not out of racism, I’m sure, but just out of the nature of their stories – nonetheless, it’s interesting) experiencing ~changes~ (in the world) in the 1970s. There’s also Kanani, a modern Hawaiian “girl of the year” doll, this year.

And these are my thoughts on that:

• Okay, Kaya’s legit, I’ll allow that.
• Marie-Grace and Cécile have the vaguest online synopses, I can’t tell what their stories are about at all and therefore cannot judge.
• I’m pretty sure I read a Dear America with the same plot as Rebecca’s story.  Dreams in the Golden Country.  (They apparently also rebooted that series, and some of the new titles… actually sound sort of interesting.  Even if they are super young adult.  I was a nutcase for that series, too.)
• So there’s finally an Asian girl!  Rock on.  Even if she is just the blonde girl’s bestie, and I can’t tell what her stories are about at all, and I’d be more interested to read about an Asian girl around 1880-1910 (but that would be too dark for them).
• Really?  The whole plot of Kanani’s two-book arc is that “she helps others by sharing Hawaii’s aloha spirit”?  That’s not a plot.  That makes me miss my Kirsten even more.
• With Felicity gone, there’s no redhead, and that’s sad.

So, children of the world: I really hope you’re getting as much out of these new girls’ stories as I did out of the ones I grew up with.  Otherwise, I just might have to be sad.

–your fangirl heroine

Television Tuesday :: 10 television children I want to see grown up.

10. Isabelle Hodes (Allie Grant, Weeds)
Isabelle got more of a plot than a lot of the kids on this list have, with her whole child modeling career, but the last we see of her is her helping her mother Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) run the taken-over drug business.  I understand that the show was focusing more on Nancy (Mary Louise Parker) and family’s new lives, but I want to know what happened with Isabelle.  I always adored her, and you know she was totally the brains of her mom’s attempts at the drug operation.  Did that drug operation last?  Did Isabelle keep modeling?  Did she get a totally awesome lesbian girlfriend once she got into high school?  I vote all of the above.

9, 8. Every single child on Sons of Anarchy (Kenny [John Abendorth/Mason Charles] and Ellie [Lela Cortines/Kerris Dorsey] Winston, Abel and Thomas Teller [both babies or toddlers and anyway I'm not 100% caught up so I'm not Googling it lest I hit a spoiler], Lyla’s kid who I can’t find on the Sons wiki or anywhere else)
C’mon, I wanna see if they stay in the life or they rebel some wacky way or what.  And they get two numbers because there’s so many of them.  Ellie especially.  Will she marry a biker guy?  Will she run away and go live in England with an investment banker?  Will she become a pornstar like stepmommy Lyla (Winter Ave Zoli)?  (I hope not that.)  Any of these choices are possible.  Kenny, I couldn’t say.  I also vote that Thomas becomes a doctor like his mommy Tara (Maggie Siff), but in medical school, he decides he’s more interested in psychology than surgery, and Abel is going to be the Teller man who actually publishes a book (it won’t have anything to do with MC life, though; it’ll be something wild and crazy, like Harry Potter but not).  And I don’t even know for Lyla’s kid.

7. Aylesh Rohan (Emma Kenney, Boardwalk Empire)
Okay.  So Aylesh just appeared.  I don’t know if she’ll recur or what, but I love her already.  She’s Margaret’s (Kelly Macdonald) youngest sister, come from Ireland, but she’s the most American of them by far.  She’s a little bookworm, and she’s intuitive as all get-out: looking at Margaret’s hat, she spun a story about Margaret’s beau that was 100% accurate, just playing, but still.  She’s just super-cute, and I want her to finish school, get a college scholarship to some lady’s college, and become a novelist.  I want her to write stories about psychic equestrian girls or something.  And I want to see it all happen.

6. Teddy and Emily Schroeder and Tommy Darmody (Rory and Declan McTigue, Lucy and Josie Gallina, and Brady and Connor Noon, Boardwalk Empire)
Teddy should be a professor of economics.  Tommy should run away to Europe and marry a French woman and bake.  Emily should become a gutsy lady attorney and be able to work for the underground, like Robin Weigert does on Sons.  These are all things I’d like to see happen.

5. Cassandra “Wheels” Kowalski (a baby, United States of Tara)
You know that baby is going to grow up to be awesome.  If she’s only answering to Wheels and Chinese swear words as an infant?  Just imagine what an epic little geek girl she’s going to be.  I refuse to imagine her being anything but.  I just have this feeling she’ll grow up and be some cross between a scenester, a Mod kid, an anime character, and a cosplayer, and she’ll be adorable and nerdy and all the likeminded boys will fall all over her.  And Charmaine (Rosemarie Dewitt) will just be saying to Neil (Patton Oswalt), “This is all your fault, and I don’t mind.”  Because quirky though she’ll be, she won’t be a screwup.

4. T Tsetsang (Brandon Dieter, Dollhouse)
Now that the world’s not in hell, T can grow up with both of his parents in a stable fashion and help rebuild the entire world!  The children are the future, and since he’s one of the only ones, well.  Be the future, T.  There’ve got to be other thoughtpocalypse babies scattered around the world, and they’re all going to converge on LA, because LA is the center of everything, and together they’ll… I don’t know.  Something important.

3. unnamed baby Washburne (is not born yet, the Firefly postseries timeline)
Even if “Float Out” hadn’t confirmed it for us, I’d have chosen to believe that Zoe (Gina Torres) was pregnant at the end of Serenity.  (The line in “Heart of Gold” is as good as proof alone: “You and I would make one beautiful baby.  And I want to meet that child one day.”  I don’t know if that was at all planned, though I suspect it was, but it’s perfect.  It’s like, there will be a baby but you will not be around to meet said baby yourself.  Stab stab stab heart, literally.)  But the confirmation just sent me absolutely around the bend with wanting this to happen.  I don’t care if technically this is comic canon, it’s an extension of the show but in print.  Baby Washburne is a girl, Zoe said, and until I’m told otherwise, I’m christening her “Hannah,” because that’s alliterative with Wash’s given name, Hoban, but not derivative of its ridiculous, and also it means “favor” or “grace,” which… well, clearly Zoe was in someone’s favor and grace to be luckily pregnant, and I like names that mean something without being absurd or obvious, and also I’ve always liked that name.  And I want to know all about Hannah’s (and any fantastical Kaylee/Simon or Mal/Inara or River/some person we haven’t met yet but not Jayne/anyone babies that would occur) adventures in space.

2. Sofia Metz (Bree Seanna Wall, Deadwood)
Sofia and Alma (Molly Parker) leave the camp at series’ end, but then what?  I think little Sofia grows up a proper lady under Alma’s care and then decides that she’s going to be a teacher, because Martha Bullock (Anna Gunn) was a powerful figure in her life, and she wants to give back to the world and teach other immigrant children how to speak English and belong in America.   She’ll have suitors, but she’ll marry in her late twenties, late for those days, and when she has children, she’ll give the girls the names of her sisters as middle names, but her son will be named for Ellsworth (Jim Beaver).  I don’t know why it was so easy to invent her future, but it was.  It’s like a Dear America epilogue.

1. Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men)
I want this so much.  Sally can turn out one of two ways: highly successful and awesome and badass, or just rebelling to rebel and sleeping with all the wrong guys and trying to “find” herself in ridiculous ways.  I hope the former.  I want her to be class valedictorian and do something really, really intellectual as a profession just to stick it to Betty’s (January Jones) notions of femininity.  I want Sally to be a freaking neuroscientist or something, and I want her to have tumultuous but safe love affairs, and I want her to go to wacky New York parties and write books, and I want her to be awesome. And she’ll somehow become friends with Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Pete’s (Vincent Kartheiser) baby, but she won’t know that, but we would, and it would be beautiful.

–your fangirl heroine.