Are you a Samantha? (No, not that one.)<\/p>\n
How about a Molly? Josefina?<\/p>\n
If these names mean anything to you, \u201cAmerican Girls,\u201d a popular podcast created and hosted by two historians who earned their doctorates at UConn might be worth a listen.<\/p>\n
Every other week, Allison Horrocks \u201916 Ph.D. and Mary Mahoney \u201918 Ph.D. delve into a book from the American Girl collection, bringing humor and their history-via-pop culture lens to the historical fiction of their childhoods.<\/p>\n
American Girl is a line of dolls and books launched by Pleasant Company in 1986 and bought by Mattel in 1998. Each doll represents a fictional character from a different historical period and background, and has a dozen or so accompanying books about the character.<\/p>\n
From its beginnings as a catalog-only operation to present day, where giant stores in New York City, Chicago, and 17 other U.S. cities not only sell the ever-expanding line of dolls (which now include dolls that look just like their owners and modern \u201cGirl of the Year\u201d dolls) but include doll hair salons and places to enjoy tea with your doll, American Girl has been part of the American retail zeitgeist for generations of children.<\/p>\n
Horrocks and Mahoney, who both earned undergraduate degrees at Trinity College in 2009 but became friends while pursuing their Ph.D.s at UConn, bonded over their love for American Girl during time spent riding the red line shuttle bus or walking to their cars in W lot when the bus was late. Their conversational style set the tone for the podcast, they say, and their educations informed their approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were discovering new types of knowledge, new topics and approaches, but we had this bond over these dolls and these stories that we both loved as children, and it was kind of this nice connective tissue and I think also served as a signal that we took our work but not ourselves that seriously,\u201d Horrocks says.<\/p>\n
Mahoney says her work teaching survey courses as a graduate student also inspired elements of the podcast, which launched in February.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think a lot of times when people enter graduate programs it\u2019s because they\u2019ve been heavily influenced by research they did as an undergrad or monographs they read, but often when students take introductory survey courses \u2026 they\u2019re drawn instead by things in pop culture that engage history that are of interest to them or at least pique their curiosity,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo often I would use things in pop culture that would be common to most of us \u2026 as an entry point \u2026 to think of history in a new and different way, possibly, for them. That was something I did as a teacher at UConn and something we do in our show now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hosts are analyzing each book of the series in historical chronological order, starting with Felicity Merriman of colonial Williamsburg, Va. They\u2019ve completed her series, as well as Josefina Montoya\u2019s, set in 1824 in New Mexico, and are well into the story of Kirsten Larson, a Swedish immigrant living in 1850s Minnesota.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve managed to tap into the nostalgia of 30-somethings for the books and dolls that in many ways defined their youth, and not only explore the historical context of each book but create a community \u2013 for example, an episode on grief when discussing the Josefina books (Josefina\u2019s mother died a year before her series begins) spurred a dialogue among listeners, the hosts say.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo now have the listeners that we do, it\u2019s just, it\u2019s really stunning in ways that I can\u2019t even express. Allison and I have received letters from people who say, \u2018I\u2019m currently being treated for cancer and I listen to your show while I\u2019m getting chemo and it makes me smile,\u2019\u201d Mahoney says. \u201cWe record this show in our living rooms in sweatpants and people are taking us with them in these very serious scenes in their lives \u2014 so it\u2019s a really intimate medium that people have treated as such and I think that\u2019s both gratifying and really humbling.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to reaching out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, listeners send emails and voicemails and share stories on a Google form.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve said we feel really fortunate that pretty much every time we click on a blurred image that comes through a private [direct message], it\u2019s a girl with a doll \u2013 which is not something a lot of people have as a social media experience,\u201d Horrocks says.<\/p>\n
Besides the overt content in the books, the American Girls have explored such topics as what makes a good friend and self-evolution.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe girls in these books are creating themselves, and [with listeners] now re-reading them as adults, we get to take that seriously,\u201d Mahoney says. \u201cThat process is still happening, you can keep creating and re-creating yourself. It\u2019s not something to apologize for, it\u2019s something to embrace.\u201d<\/p>\n
As young girls, Horrocks, a park ranger at Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Mahoney, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at Trinity College in Hartford, say they never could\u2019ve imagined they\u2019d appear in The New York Times <\/em>(the podcast was written up in August<\/a>). But they did know some things back then, like that they would always identify with their Molly dolls.<\/p>\n When asked which American Girl they are by everyone who ever interviews them, it\u2019s always the same: \u201cMolly is the only answer, even though we can\u2019t really explain why,\u201d Mahoney says.<\/p>\n Molly McIntire, one of the three original American Girl dolls released in 1986 along with Kirsten and Samantha Parkington, is a spunky brunette with glasses who lives during World War II.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t try to fail my eye exam [as a child] for nothing,\u201d Horrocks deadpans. \u201cI wanted to fail that exam because I wanted to look more like my doll. In a reversal of fortunes, I still have the bangs, she still has the bangs, I\u2019m cutting them for us both. Now I have the glasses and hers are lost, so it\u2019s like we\u2019ve both grown up, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCredit to Allison for working in the fact that she stress-cuts her own bangs into this interview,\u201d Mahoney chimes in. \u201cYou know, I\u2019m not wearing saddle shoes almost every day for no reason. I mean, we\u2019re doing what we can with what we have and we\u2019re kind of failing to measure up to Molly but\u2026 it\u2019s the climb, as Miley [Cyrus] would say.\u201d<\/p>\n