I was an American Girl. Addy was my favorite. She's probably responsible for my love of Civil War history. I was a romantic little stoic child. Or at least I was helplessly romantic and tried desperately to be stoic. Addy and her struggle to keep her feeling on the inside when her father and brother were sold to another plantation and when she was terrified on her run North was one of those things that got my little imagination running at ten or twenty time my reading speed. I made up stories about runaway slaves and tragically separated families for the next five or six years...
And it was the history too: the little details of how they lived and what they wore and all that. American Girls was really good at that. There is a long list of historical fiction set in that time that came after Addy and I would probably have missed if I wasn't introduced to the time through the Addy stories. I can't remember many of the names. There was one about a quaker community... Who Comes With Cannons... I think... Across Five Aprils is great... lots of slaves hiding in hay carts and that sort of thing. I would probably not take the Addy books with me to school (though I might bring my mini doll just for old time sake) but those stories were definitely important.
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