Hey! :) I just discovered that my university library has several of the Dear America and History Mysteries books, which is super cool, and I was wondering if you knew of any other books that are similar to those (I also know about the Girls of Many Lands)
oh my goooooood, love dear america and history mysteries!
this might not be exactly what you are looking for, but dear america does in fact have an extended universe. there is, of course, the two versions of the dear america series (the original series and the 2010 relaunch), as well as the my america series meant for younger readers, the royal diaries, and my name is america for boys. HOWEVER, there are then other countries who have their own series: canada has dear canada (which is the only one i've occasionally seen in us libraries) and i am canada, uk has my story and my royal story, australia has my australian story, new zealand has my (new zealand) story, and india seems to have dear india and a princess's diary. furthermore, if you speak french, there's mon histoire from france (and some, if not all, of the canada books have french versions), or if you speak spanish, there's the diarios mexicanos. (editing to say that i also might've just found a welsh-language version called fy hanes i.)
... however, obviously a lot of these are noooot exactly accessible to most people. i was able to get all of the dear canada series as a kid (but that was mostly thanks to living close to the border), and have a decent number of the uk books just by virtue of having been the tiniest bit obsessive about this all as a child, and one mon histoire that i still haven't read yet. so. tldr on the dear america expanded universe: just try to get your hands on what you can, since there's simply an insane amount to work from, and most of them that i've read have been pretty solid!
that being said, i also recently discovered (entirely by accident, i stumbled across one of the books at a thrift store) a series that seems to have published by scholastic in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the og dear america series. i don't really have any evidence for this other than the publication date, the author crossovers from the da universe, and the general look of the books since there is very little info about this series online, but i think all of that already is a pretty compelling case. anyways! the series is called portraits, and the three books published all take a famous painting of a girl and write a backstory for it. i have not read the one that i found yet, so i can't technically recommend the series, but it is another one out there!
(pardon the weird angle, i was trying to show that the spine has a little portrait on it like the da books.)
i could absolutely keep going here, but one last series that i think is spiritually linked to da/aghm are the lady grace mysteries. i am 70% sure they had a us release at some point, but the series is british, so no promises on how easy it is to find these books. the series follows lady grace, the youngest lady-in-waiting to queen elizabeth i, as she encounters mysteries around the court, and are written as her own personal journals. i was lucky enough to encounter these at my childhood library, so if anyone else read them, please let me know and say where you ran into them!
