Did American Girl Dolls Do Right By History? (Part 2)

Civics 101

NHPR

Education, History, Supreme Court, American History, Elections, Democracy, Society & Culture, Government, Civics, Politics, Social Studies

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode of Civics 101 is the second chapter of a story about American Girl dolls, and what this beloved brand got right – and wrong – about the American experience.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. I am here with my co-host Nick
0:12.9	Capady-J. And my dear dear friend, Justine Paradise. Hello, Nick. Hello, Justine.
0:18.5	Hi. It's for having me. Hello. Hello. Justine, for those of you who don't know, is also
0:23.8	a producer and so many other things in a podcast called Outside In. And we thank her very
0:28.9	much for being here. Both of you have started a journey with me, and we are going to complete
0:34.2	that journey in this part two of our, I suppose, rather unusual two-part series here on Civics 101,
0:42.8	because we're talking about dolls. Yeah, I mean, I think I get it at this point, Hannah, but yeah,
0:49.6	you sure are. Specifically American Girl Dolls. And you can get the full download of American
0:55.3	Girl's early history, and I warmly recommend you do, because without it, this will not make a lot
1:00.2	of sense in part one of this two-parter, but here in part two. We're going to ask some questions
1:05.6	about what it actually means to craft the American Girl narrative. What is an American Girl? And how does
1:14.8	a company that makes toys also craft that narrative responsibly?
1:33.2	I have had limited conversations with people inside the brand and have done a lot of research
1:38.0	on the brand, so I can't say if everybody is aware of that social responsibility, but I can say
1:43.7	that, you know, even from the very beginning, I think there's some really interesting historic
1:49.6	conversations about the brand's responsibility and that tension around profit.
1:54.8	This is Emily Zoslow, author of Playing with America's Doll, a cultural analysis of the American
2:00.8	Girl collection. I was really interested then in the historical dolls and the stories that the
2:08.2	brand was telling about American Girl, because if you have a brand that claims to represent American
2:13.6	Girl and to be American Girl, that kind of leads one to ask two really important questions.
2:20.2	How does the brand define American and how does the brand define Girl? So I was going to
2:25.5	be interested in both of those things. So Emily has researched the Pleasant Company and American Girl
	...

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