The books that stand out most clearly in my memory are the ones where the girl witnesses some defining historical moment firsthand—the dropping of a bomb, or the arrival of the Nazis. I couldn’t tell you if I read the Oregon Trail diary, but I know exactly where I was and how my heart raced when I read Amber Billows’s Pearl Harbor entry (with a flashlight in my bunk bed on a class trip) or that Julie Weiss’s mother had killed herself after being harassed by Nazis in 1938 Vienna (in the backseat of my family’s station wagon on the FDR Drive.)

These diaries followed a similar arc: Their protagonists started out with basically good lives. Their frustrations were normal, adolescent ones. Their parents fought; they were waiting for their breasts to grow. And then one day, it happened: that defining moment. You, the reader, felt vividly scared to learn what the diarist had seen and heard and smelled, whom she might have lost. But unlike in real life, you’d seen it coming since you picked the book, with its rough-edged pages and smooth place-marking ribbon, off the library shelf. The defining moment had already defined history. It was easier to encounter that sort of news in the middle of a book that was guaranteed to keep going than it was to sense that your own life—which didn’t seem to have much to do with history at all—might have reached an inflection point, of sorts, in the middle of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

Dear America was not my first foray into historical fiction, or even history. I loved the American Girl books and had dabbled in the old-school Childhood of Famous Americans biographies. But here was history in the first person. With Dear America, learning about history became almost a secondary concern. I read the books to learn about how girls—regular people, who might not have even known that their (fictional) lives had much to do with history—lived through it. (Unlike Anne Frank, whose diary I would read for the first time several years later, the Dear America girls, as far as I can remember, survived.)

That sentiment would surely have horrified those who, unbeknownst to me at the time, had spent the preceding decade battling my educators and their ilk on the history fields of the culture wars. As others have noted, the 36 books in the original Dear America series were published between 1996 and 2004, right after the fierce debate over the National History Standards. The books’ focus on the subjective lives of insignificant, imaginary figures—girls!—was exactly the sort of thing Lynne Cheney warned of in her polemic “The End of History” when she wrote, “Imagine an outline for the teaching of American history in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president.” To minimize the roles of America’s great men for the sake of political correctness, critics of the new standards charged, would be to forsake the cause of history itself.