American Girl dolls have re-entered the chat. To many, they're still relevant.

Kirsten Larson moved to Minnesota in 1854 at age 9 when her family left Sweden. That year, she lost a friend to cholera, made friends with a Dakota girl, stole animal pelts from a dead fur trapper, struggled to learn English in school and let a raccoon into her family's house, causing it to burn down.

Kirsten is an American Girl doll. She also is an icon for many Minnesota girls who grew up with the American Girl line of dolls in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, along with its catalogs and books describing a year in the life of each fictional girl.

The dolls have seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years — they were the subject of a Saturday Night Live skit in 2023 — and have become popular collector's items and transitioned smoothly from historical fiction to the modern vernacular of memes.

But Kirsten and the other American Girl dolls represent far more than all that, Mary Mahoney, a historian, an author and co-host of the podcast "Dolls of Our Lives," said Saturday at a Minnesota History Center program tied to the visiting "Girlhood (It's complicated)" exhibit.

"Things like this matter so much because people need to see themselves in the past to feel like they matter," Mahoney said after her talk, which was attended by dozens of people and more than a few dolls — mostly Kirstens.

Bridges to the past

American Girl debuted in 1986. Besides Kirsten, the early dolls included Molly, who grew up during World War II; Addy, whose family escaped slavery and rebuilt their lives in Philadelphia; Samantha, a Victorian-era orphan; and Felicity, a Revolutionary War-era girl.

The American Girl company has since added more dolls, including 2024′s doll of the year: Lila, a gymnast from St. Paul.

Mahoney and her friend Allison Horrocks discovered a mutual love of American Girl in a history Ph.D program at the University of Connecticut. Both identify as Mollys.

"We were asked in the program what made you want to be historians, and all these people listed these monographs that were so serious, and I said Molly," said Mahoney, who added that Molly served as a bridge between her and her grandmother.

"I would show her pictures from the Molly books, and she was very nonchalant, and she'd say 'Yeah, I had that. We had a Victory garden.'"

Mahoney and Horrocks started the podcast, re-reading the books and discussing them in a loving but critical, and often comedic, way through a modern historical lens. In 2023, the two released a book with the same name as the podcast, "Dolls of Our Lives."

As with all history, Mahoney said, the American Girl books reflect not just the time they were set but also when they were written. Take Kirsten's books: "They're stories about the 1850s in Minnesota and also stories about the 1980s in the U.S.," Mahoney said.

Like many depictions of frontier life at the time — think "Dances with Wolves" and the "Little House" TV show — the Kirsten books focus on a family of white settlers. While they include Indigenous characters, they don't consider the implications of white settlement from the view of the people already living there.

The characters in the books aren't "thinking about settler colonialism or things that we might think of if we were rewriting these books today," Mahoney said. At the same time, the books also suggest how people thought about immigration in the 1980s, when they were written.

Just as history is complicated, the books and readers' relationships with them are, too. Mahoney said she and Horrocks have heard from women who came to the United States as children from all over the world and resonated with Kirsten's story.

"A lot of women wrote to us and said Kirsten was so important to them, because they themselves had been immigrants to our country as children," she said.

Revisiting childhood

Mahoney said there could be lots of reasons why adults who grew up with the American Girl stories — which focus on strong girls and the importance of family, friends and feelings — are coming back to them.

"I think we're seeing the rise of nostalgia for childhood interest for millennials and Gen Z, and I think there has to be something with that," she said. "Maybe a return to childhood, either for fun or out of the stresses of modern life."

After Saturday's program, attendee Aurora Fenzl said American Girl books helped her get into reading. Growing up in Mound, she said she appreciates that American Girl exposed her to stories about people who didn't look like most of the people in her community.

Following her grandfather's death, Fenzl remembered watching the movie based on the Felicity doll's story, which involves the character's grandpa dying.

"To go through that and have that support and that visualization of, it's OK to be sad — it really helped in that moment," she said.

Hannah Peterson, who grew up in St. Paul, said American Girl books helped her learn that girls in the past had lived through hard times. She said that framework still helps her understand difficult things today.

"They've gotten through things, this might just be our version," she said.

Peterson, who is pregnant, said she hopes to introduce American Girl to her daughter. "I hope she likes them," she said.