Dear America

Dear America is a series of historical novels for older girls published by Scholastic. The series was originally canceled in 2004 after its thirty-sixth book but was relaunched in September 2010 with a new book and re-releases of three older books. Since the relaunch three new titles (one being a sequel) have come out and some of the older books have gotten new re-releases.

It inspired three spin-off series in the US:

• My Name Is America: Dear America's Spear Counterpart.
• My America: A series of trilogies focusing on younger characters.
• The Royal Diaries: Fictional diaries of various historical royal women as girls.

There were also versions produced by several of Scholastic's international branches (see Dear Canada), and an HBO miniseries.

Each book is written in the form of a diary of a young woman's life during an important event or time period in American history, ranging from as early as the voyage of the Mayflower to as recent as the Vietnam War.

Here's the official site.

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Tropes used in Dear America include:

• The American Civil War: When Will This Cruel War Be Over?, A Picture of Freedom, A Light in the Storm, I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly
• American Dream
• The American Revolution: The Winter of Red Snow, Love Thy Neighbor, Cannons at Dawn
• Arranged Marriage: In A Coal Miner's Bride Anetka's hand in marriage was promised by her father to a acquittance in exchange for tickets to bring her and her younger brother to America from Poland.
• Artistic License History: In My Heart is on the Ground,about Nannie Little Rose, a Lakota Indian girl who is sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a school meant to teach Indians how to act more "white". Firstly, Nannie probably would not have been given a diary in the first place, which discounts the whole book. But, let's say she was. She would not refer to herself as "Sioux", instead she would use her area or band. Rinaldi also gets many Lakota customs wrong, mainly by using American descriptions of them rather than finding out what actually happened. She even makes up the more "Indian" sounding words for Lakota words that already exist, such as "night-middle-made" and "friend-to-go-between-us". Needless to say, actual Lakota were less than pleased.
• Bittersweet Ending: Some of the books end with this type of ending, with some of the heroine's friends and family dead or missing. The epilogues also count as well.
• Black Best Friend: In Look to the Hills the main character Zettie, though six years younger, is her mistress's loved and trusted companion.
• Boarding School of Horrors: My Heart Is on the Ground
• Civil Rights Movement: With the Might of Angels
• Cool Big Sis: the main characters show elements of this if they have younger siblings, and their older sisters are this as well.
• The Colonial Period: A Journey to the New World (1607), Standing in the Light (1763), and Look to the Hills (1763).
• Continuity Nod: The narrator of Seeds of Hope talks about going to live in Oregon City with their aunt Augusta, uncle Charles and cousins Hattie, Bennie, and Jake Campbell who had traveled out to Oregon by wagon from Missouri. (aka the family of the narrator from Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie. Both books were written by Kristiana Gregory)
• Driven to Suicide: Julie's mother in One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping falls into deep depression and kills herself after the Nazi raid on the family home.
• Downer Ending: Some of the epilogues end with this, especially the book So Far From Home, where in the epilogue it is stated that main character dies a few years later of a fever.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The Dear America series is chock full of Family-Unfriendly Death accurate to the time period of each book. For example, the death of the protagonist's love interest in the Titanic diary, and, more traumatically, the multiple deaths that occur along the journey of a girl taking a wagon train out west (including one death from being swept away while crossing a river, and one brutal Infant Immortality aversion when the protagonist mistakes hemlock for an edible root and feeds a bit to another young girl while preparing dinner).
  • So Far from Home, the one about Irish immigrant mill workers, includes the hair-caught-in-the-machinery scenario.
• Fiery Redhead: The main character of A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska complains about everything about her looks except her red hair. At one point she suddenly remembered that she was her mother's fiery redhead and started yelling at her ungrateful husband with a list of all the things she does for him.
• The Great Depression: Christmas After All
• The Greatest History Never Told: A lot of the books take place during times and in places that people rarely hear about.
• Historical Villain Downgrade: A very obvious example of a whole group being downgraded is in My Heart is on the Ground by Ann Rinaldi, which makes the white men who took Lakota children to be "reeducated" in the ways of white people seem only like misguided missionaries.
• Innocent Inaccurate
• Just Friends: Madeline Beck of My Secret War has her friend Clara think she is in love with a boy she has started a club with named Johnny, although Maddie refuses to believe it, thinking she is Just Friends with him.
• Mama Bear: In A Coal Miner's Bride Americans were throwing rocks at Anetka and her family. She tried to ignore it until one of the stones hit her step-daughter at which point she says she became a mad woman like a mother cat.
• May-December Romance: One of the key points of A Coal Miner's Bride.
• Noble Savage: Books set in The Wild West or the New World often uses this trope.
• Point of View: All of the books are written in 1st person narration.
• Politically-Correct History: My Face to the Wind, A Light in the Storm, and Standing in the Light, and My Heart is on the Ground all have this.
• Roman à Clef: Usually it will recreate things that happened in history, only on a smaller scale and before the actual event happens.
• Scrapbook Story: Every book in the series is in a diary format.
• Shown Their Work: At the end of each book is "Life In (insert time era here) America" where it shows how life was like in America as well as historical background information.
• Signs of Disrepair: In one of the Dear America books, the main character's cousin comes from a town in Texas called Heart's Bend, except that the B is missing from the sign at the railway station, so it says Heart's end.
• The Sixties: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
• Twenty Minutes Into the Past: Where Have All the Flowers Gone? which takes place in 1968. While it was written 30 years after that, it's still kind of recent for the series.
• Unreliable Narrator: The books narrator is somewhat unreliable, considering the age and the point of view of the girl.
• The Vietnam War: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
• Where Are They Now? Epilogue: Each book ends with an epilogue, explaining what happens to the character, her family and her friends (when applicable) after the book ends.
• The Wild West: The Great Railroad Race, West To a Land of Plenty, Seeds of Hope
• World War I: When Christmas Comes Again
• World War II: Early Sunday Morning, The Fences Between Us, My Secret War, One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping