{"id":209666,"date":"2024-03-26T07:30:41","date_gmt":"2024-03-26T11:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=209666"},"modified":"2024-03-14T13:47:44","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T17:47:44","slug":"in-new-book-history-ph-d-s-explore-why-we-cant-quit-american-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2024\/03\/in-new-book-history-ph-d-s-explore-why-we-cant-quit-american-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"In New Book, History Ph.D.s Explore \u2018Why We Can\u2019t Quit American Girl\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the right hands, dolls can tell all kinds of stories about the human experience. Most children understand this. Greta Gerwig, director of recent Oscar nominee “Barbie,” understands this. So, too, do Mary Mahoney \u201818 Ph.D. and Allison Horrocks \u201816 Ph.D. <\/span>\u2013<\/span> historians whose interests in American studies, books, and family culture all converge in their new book “Dolls of Our Lives<\/span>.”<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
“Dolls of Our Lives” was published in November 2023 by Macmillan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Released in November, “<\/span>Dolls of Our Lives” is an offshoot of the eponymous podcast the pair have hosted since 2019. Each episode of the podcast analyzes a specific book in an American Girl character series through the lenses of history and pop culture. (For example, the episode “Classy, Bougie, Ringlets\u201d discusses the book \u201cSamantha Learns a Lesson,\u201d placing it in conversation with other modern-day classics like Selling Sunset.) <\/span><\/p>\n

In their book, Mahoney and Horrocks get to break away from the American Girl literary world to consider how the brand \u2013 its characters, its stories, its publications, and even its merchandise \u2013 shaped the real lives of girls (and others) across the country.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>We wanted to expand the mission of our show to not just tell our stories, but to explore what it meant for generations of fans and people for whom it mattered,\u201d says Mahoney.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Living History<\/h3>\n

The book\u2019s origins feel as magical as receiving a burgundy doll-sized box for a birthday: Mahoney and Horrocks were contacted by an editor from Macmillan Publishers, who had listened to the show and recognized something special. This editor wasn\u2019t alone \u2013 the show attracted media buzz from the likes of <\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>NPR<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>UConn Magazine<\/span><\/a>, while the book prompted a warm-and-fuzzy feature in <\/span>The New Yorker<\/span><\/a>. As Mahoney and Horrocks know all too well, revisiting the world of American Girl is a surefire way to get people talking.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the creators are careful not to lean on nostalgia. In contrast to, say, pretending that Molly lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by nuclear war (a fan\u2019s childhood anecdote recounted in the book), their engagement with American Girl\u2019s legacy is marked by careful attention to history and critical analysis.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think people who are really drawn to these kinds of conversations, they\u2019re fascinated by reviewing something they loved, or still love, with a different lens and different outlook,\u201d Horrocks says. \u201cAnd I think that is very different than just reveling in something you used to take pleasure in. … The brand wanted to spark curiosity, and that <\/span>worked.<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Within the book\u2019s 243 pages, Horrocks and Mahoney trace the evolution of the American Girl brand, from its founding as Pleasant Company by educational entrepreneur Pleasant Rowland in 1986 to its present-day incarnation as a Mattel subsidiary. <\/span><\/p>\n

They share firsthand interviews with women who helped bring American Girl history to life, among them Mary Wiseman, a Martha Washington living history performer at Colonial Williamsburg; Ingrid Hess, an illustrator who worked on the iconic AG book \u201cThe Care and Keeping of You\u201d; and Courtney Price, the first girl who got to trace her own family\u2019s history by being transformed into a paper doll for American Girl magazine.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI did a lot of 19<\/span>th<\/span> century history when I was in grad school, so it\u2019s nice to talk to and write about people who are still with us,\u201d says Mahoney. \u201cSomeone I can call on the phone \u2013 what a gift!\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Allison
Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney bonded over their love of American Girl dolls at UConn, and have turned that love into a popular podcast. (Photo by Helder Mira, courtesy Trinity College Office of Communications)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Better (Research) Together<\/h3>\n

For as long as they have been collaborators, Horrocks and Mahoney have never lived in the same state. Mahoney works as a Digital Scholarship Strategist for Trinity College-Hartford; Horrocks works as an interpretive park ranger in Rhode Island. Like their podcast, their book was made possible by virtual collaboration, file-sharing, and the occasional joint excursion to Colonial Williamsburg.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times, it feels solitary when you do research \u2013 you go to an archive, you\u2019re reading books,\u201d says Mahoney. \u201cBut this felt like a joint effort.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The virtual space in which much American Girl content exists also lent itself to a new kind of historical work, one that took both historians beyond the realm of anything they\u2019d tackled before.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think what\u2019s really different is usually you\u2019re visiting an archive that\u2019s been set up by other people,\u201d says Horrocks. \u201cReally, for this, we created the archive: the archive is in our Google Drive, it\u2019s in other people\u2019s Flickr account, it\u2019s in things that people chose to share with us. There isn\u2019t a singular place that you could go to access all these materials, so we\u2019ve had to build up a kind of borrower\u2019s library of all of it.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This work has allowed us to engage people who think history is not for them<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Historical training like hers, Horrocks says, tends to focus on physical artifacts. This has equipped her well to consider how objects like books, dolls, and accessories actually held meaning for the young people to whom they were important.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think what makes [our work] different from a corporate-minded history is, we\u2019re curious about the ephemera in a book,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re curious about how people actually use the products, not just how they were produced and then stored in an archive.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This democratic approach creates products, like the podcast and book, that virtually everyone can appreciate. Horrocks and Mahoney take the specialized training and knowledge they acquired through their graduate studies and transform them into public-facing scholarship you don\u2019t need an advanced degree to wade through \u2013 childhood afternoons spent networking with Felicity and Kaya will suffice.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis work has allowed us to engage people who think history is not for them \u2013 which is the people public historians most want to reach \u2013 and actually get them involved or interested in conversations about history that they think didn’t include them or weren’t of interest to them,\u201d says Mahoney. \u201cAnd that’s probably been the most rewarding public history piece of it for me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Molly Gets Kicked Out<\/h3>\n

Asked which American Girl doll would be most likely to get a UConn history Ph.D., Horrocks doesn\u2019t hesitate.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt has to be Julie Albright, because of the women\u2019s basketball team,\u201d she says, naming the spunky young San Franciscan who contends with the real-time implementation of Title IX at her elementary school. \u201cI could see her hauling into a 1980s lecture in a power suit.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mahoney offers a counterpoint in Kit Kittredge, an aspiring journalist who grows up during the Great Depression.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cKit could have come of age and been part of the Federal Writers\u2019 Project, perhaps doing oral histories, and then maybe she gets into the UConn history Ph.D. later in life, kind of as a retirement project,\u201d she says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJust thinking about it,\u201d Mahoney adds, \u201cI think Molly may have tried to get a Ph.D. in history, but she would have been kicked out for basically doing \u2018<\/span>Great Man<\/span><\/a>\u2019 World War II history.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, Mahoney and Horrocks are both self-identified \u201cMolly\u201ds. Thankfully, their collective body of work shows no warning signs of veering into this sort of uncritical hero-worship.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While both historians enjoy the success of their recent publication, they don\u2019t expect to close the book on their work together anytime soon.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy intention is to keep going, thinking about how I can reach people about public history, using pop culture as a shared language to access historical questions or historical thinking,\u201d says Mahoney. The response to the book, she says, \u201cmakes us feel that we\u2019re on the right path, trying to do work that can meet people where they are … and take them somewhere else.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Mahoney and Allison Horrocks talk the enduring significance of American Girl — and why Molly would get kicked out of UConn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":211078,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,1711,2226,1875,2235,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2413],"class_list":["post-209666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-arts-culture","category-clas","category-grad-school","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-21 04:36:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209666"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211580,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209666\/revisions\/211580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/211078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209666"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=209666"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=209666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}