Pleasant Rowland, who founded the American Girl historical doll, accessory, and book collection in the mid-1980s, claimed that her dolls were like “chocolate cake with vitamins,” enjoyable, but also educational. Although history has always played a part in the American Girl brand, its role has fluctuated over time in concert with changing social discourses about gender and race in American culture. This essay explores how the brand has engaged with these shifting discourses over the last thirty years as it determines how to invite children and their parents to encounter the brand’s retelling of the past. How have the “vitamins” that Rowland imagined for her consumers changed over time as the seventeen historical characters have been created, rebranded, and marketed in contemporary America?

Food is material and familiar, and because it is, we are often overconfident about our ability to understand the culinary past. It is easy to believe that if we can discover the recipe for some forgotten dish, the history of the dish becomes intelligible. When it does not, it tempts those who consume culinary history to impose modern sensibilities on our predecessors. “The Nation before Taste” argues that historians and museum curators must be especially vigilant when presenting the history of food. Reviewing a series of historical challenges that stemmed from studying the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the author suggests three strategies for grounding food history in the past: recognizing that taste is constructed and temporal; engaging with material and social contexts, especially physiology, class, and gender; and admitting to our audiences that not all culinary mysteries have immediate or simple answers.