Dear America is a series of historical fiction novels for children published by Scholastic starting in 1996. By 1998, the series had 12 titles with 3.5 million copies in print. Each book is written in the form of a diary of a young woman's life during important events or time periods in American history, such as the establishment of Plymouth Colony, the Salem Witch Trials, slavery, the California gold rush, the Great Depression, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the RMS Titanic, and most major wars. Originally all the books had a ribbon inserted as a bookmark, furthering the concept of the book as a diary, but this was later discontinued.
Nine books in the series were adapted as half-hour television episodes for HBO in 1999 and 2000, followed by three volumes of the spin-off series The Royal Diaries.
There are thirty-six books in the original Dear America series, which was published between 1996 and 2004.
The series was relaunched in September 2010 with its first new title since 2004, The Fences Between Us by Kirby Larson, as well as re-releases of earlier books. 2011 saw the publication of the first sequel in the series: Cannons at Dawn, a sequel to The Winter of Red Snow.
Three similar series were also published by Scholastic:
In addition, several of Scholastic's international divisions have published series inspired by the Dear America series:
Similar series from other publishers include:
Half-hour dramatizations of nine books from the series aired on HBO between March 1999 and July 2000. They were also played on FX in the 2000s. As of November 2025, all nine episodes are available for streaming on Tubi and The Roku Channel, split into two "volumes" of six and three episodes.