At first I resisted this anti-Barbie. The cheapest starter kit for Felicity, the colonial doll, goes for $87. The American Girl product generally exudes an odor of political correctness—there’s a doll for every ethnicity—that made me want to bolt and splurge on the Barbie Hot Tub Party Bus ($64.74 at Wal-Mart). American Girl’s founder, Pleasant T. Rowland, used to be a teacher, and that too was irri­tating. In 1998, Mattel bought Pleasant Company, and a short time later, I relented. We acquired Kit, the Great Depression doll.

Then a friend handed down a Molly, American Girl’s World War II doll. Daughter Number One approved of her accessory school desk and the fact that she knew about knitting blankets for soldiers.

Next, we purchased Addy, the Civil War doll. She, like each of the dolls, came with a novelette about her time period. A bad plantation owner sold Addy’s father to another plantation; a bad overseer made Addy eat slugs. Then Addy and her mother escaped to freedom (we reread this story several times). Although we don’t have Josefina, we do have Josefina’s herb-gathering outfit—thank you, Grandma. And we do know she is Hispanic and lives on a rancho in the colonial New Mexico of 1824.

The deeper difference between Barbie and the American Girl is that the latter’s culture is rooted in fact, not relationship.

The facts and the stories hooked us. On Fifth Avenue, there’s an American Girl store we have vis­ited twice. Molly had her hair done there. After an unfortunate blow to her eye, Kit went off in a wheel­chair to the American Girl hospital. I have drawn the line at buying tickets to an American Girl play (about Addy’s flight), but my daughters are working to change their mother’s mind.

So are millions of other girls, including, appar­ently, those who live far away from the three American Girl Place stores. One and a half million girls and their parents traveled an average of over four hours last year to visit the American Place flagship in Chicago (there’s another in Los Angeles), spending an average of four hours and $225 there, pursuing such activities as dining on pancakes with their dolls.

To be sure, not all American Girl dolls have a his­tory theme. Another of the company’s big successes is the “Just Like You” doll: girls select a toy with the same hair color, eyes, and skin tone as their own.

Still, the American Girl doll warrants comparison as much to Harry Potter as to Barbie, for it achieves something that parents feared could never be. In the case of Harry Potter, the feat was getting kids to read books with words from the SAT. In the American Girl case, it was getting them to want to know that Pearl Harbor happened and that it was followed by food rationing and entry into war in Europe.

One of the great trips to midtown Manhattan of Daughter Number One’s childhood was our journey to American Girl Place to replace Molly’s broken glasses. This time, we got the tortoise shell model. Knowing more about Molly’s world enables my girls to understand a bit about their grandmother’s war­time childhood, including the blackouts. For much of my daughters’ lives, I’ve been writing a book about the Great Depression. To them that meant that I was too often out of their field of vision, typ­ing. Getting to know Kit, even my five-year-old learned that girls like to type—Kit has a typewriter with a ribbon—and that there might be a reason why her mother talks about Franklin Roosevelt.

The other day I noticed that Mattel’s CEO, Robert Eckert, had told analysts that American Girl Place in L.A. was “a hot ticket.” In 2005, after all, American Girl revenues rose 15 percent, while Barbie’s have fallen for 11 consecutive quarters worldwide. So much for KGOY in Brooklyn. Molly is probably too much of a lady to shove Barbie aside, but it’s heart­ening to see her, wireframes and all, claiming space beside the leggy and factless one, right there on the Mattel homepage.