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After-Dinner Conversation
The Diary of a Decadent
By José Asunción Silva
University of Texas Press, 2005

Lost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide in 1896, and not published until 1925, José Asunción Silva's After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's finest fin de siècle novels and the first one to be translated into English. Perhaps the single best work for understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century writing in South America, After-Dinner Conversation is also cited as the continent's first psychological novel and an outstanding example of modernista fiction and the Decadent sensibility.

Semi-autobiographical and more important for style than plot, After-Dinner Conversation is the diary of a Decadent sensation-collector in exile in Paris who undertakes a quest to find his beloved Helen, a vision whom his fevered imagination sees as his salvation. Along the way, he struggles with irreconcilable urges and temptations that pull him in every direction while he endures an environment indifferent or hostile to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, as did the modernista writers themselves. Kelly Washbourne's excellent translation preserves Silva's lush prose and experimental style. In the introduction, one of the most wide-ranging in Silva criticism, Washbourne places the life and work of Silva in their literary and historical contexts, including an extended discussion of how After-Dinner Conversation fits within Spanish American modernismo and the Decadent movement. Washbourne's perceptive comments and notes also make the novel accessible to general readers, who will find the work surprisingly fresh more than a century after its composition.

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All Will Yet Be Well
The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873-1952
Suzanne L. Bunkers
University of Iowa Press, 1993

Sarah Gillespie Huftalen led an unconventional life for a rural midwestern woman of her time. Born in 1865 near Manchester, Iowa, she was a farm girl who became a highly regarded country school and college teacher; she married a man older than either of her parents, received a college degree later in life, and was committed to both family and career. A gifted writer, she crafted essays, teacher-training guides, and poetry while continuing to write lengthy, introspective entries in her diary, which spans the years from 1873 to 1952. In addition, she gathered extensive information about the quietly tragic life of her mother, Emily, and worked to preserve Emily's own detailed diary.

In more than 3,500 pages, Sarah writes about her multiple roles as daughter, sister, wife, teacher, family historian, and public figure. Her diary reflects the process by which she was socialized into these roles and her growing consciousness of the ways in which these roles intersected. Not only does her diary embody the diverse strategies used by one woman to chart her life's course and to preserve her life's story for future generations, it also offers ample evidence of the diary as a primary form of private autobiography for individuals whose lives do not lend themselves to traditional definitions of autobiography.

Taken together, Emily's and Sarah's extraordinary diaries span nearly a century and thus form a unique mother/daughter chronicle of daily work and thoughts, interactions with neighbors and friends and colleagues, and the destructive family dynamics that dominated the Gillespies. Sarah's consciousness of the abusive relationship between her mother and father haunts her diary, and this dramatic relationship is duplicated in Sarah's relationship with her brother, Henry, Suzanne Bunkers' skillful editing and analysis of Sarah's diary reveal the legacy of a caring, loving mother reflected in her daughter's work as family member, teacher, and citizen.

The rich entries in Sarah Gillespie Huftalen's diary offer us brilliant insights into the importance of female kinship networks in American life, the valued status of many women as family chroniclers, and the fine art of selecting, piecing, stitching, and quilting that characterizes the many shapes of women's autobiographies. Read Sarah's dairy to discover why "all will yet be well."

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Architecture, You, and Me
The Diary of a Development
Sigfried Giedion
Harvard University Press

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A Bachelor's Life In Antebellum Mississippi
The Diary Of Dr. Elijah Millington Walker
Lynette Boney Wrenn
University of Tennessee Press, 2004

“This is a splendid diary of a man and physician during the late antebellum years, sure to interest not only historians of medicine but also historians of gender, the South, and antebellum politics. . . . An exceptionally useful historical document as well as a good read.” —Steven M. Stowe, Indiana University

Elijah Millington Walker began to keep a diary midway through his medical apprenticeship in Oxford, Mississippi. He composed a lengthy preface to the diary, in which he remembered his life from the time of his family’s arrival in north Mississippi in 1834, when he was ten years old, until late 1848, when the University of Mississippi opened and Walker’s diary begins.

On one level, the diary records the life of a bachelor, chronicling the difficulties of an ambitious young physician who would like to marry but is hampered by poverty and his professional aspirations. Walker details the qualities he desires in a wife and criticizes women who do not measure up; a loyal wife, in Walker’s highly romanticized image, remains a true helpmeet even to the most debased drunkard. On another level, Walker describes various medical cases, giving readers an idea of the kinds of diseases prevalent in the lower South at mid-century, as well as their treatment by orthodox physicians. In this vivid chronicle of everyday life in antebellum Mississippi, Walker also finds space to comment on a wide range of topics that affected the state and the region, including pioneer life in north Mississippi, evangelical Protestantism, the new state university at Oxford, the threat of secession in 1849–50, Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850, foreign affairs, and local railroad development. A strong defender of the Union at mid-century, Walker nonetheless defended slavery and distinctively Southern institutions.

A Bachelor’s Life in Antebellum Mississippi brings to the public one of the few diaries of a very intelligent yet “ordinary” man, a non-elite member of a society dominated by a planter aristocracy. The author’s frankness and flair for writing reflect a way of life not often seen; this volume will thus prove a valuable addition to the body of primary documents from the early republic.

Lynette Boney Wrenn has taught history at Memphis State University and Southwestern College. She is the author of Crisis and Commission Government in Memphis: Elite Rule in a Gilded Age City and Cinderella of the New South: A History of the Cottonseed Industry, 1855–1955. Wrenn lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
 

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The Compensations of War
The Diary of an Ambulance Driver during the Great War
By Guy Emerson Bowerman
University of Texas Press, 1983

In 1917, shortly after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany, Guy Emerson Bowerman, Jr., enlisted in the American army’s ambulance service. Like other young ambulance drivers—Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Cowley—Bowerman longed to “see the show.” He was glad to learn that the ambulance units were leaving for France right away.

For seventeen months, until the armistice of November 1918, Bowerman kept an almost daily diary of the war. To read his words today is to live the war with an immediacy and vividness of detail that is astonishing.

Only twenty when he enlisted, Bowerman was an idealistic, if snobbish, young man who exulted that his section was made up mostly of young “Yalies” like himself. But he expected the war to change him, and it did. In the end he writes that he and his compatriots scarcely remember a world at peace. "The old life was gone forever. . ."

Guy Bowerman’s unit was attached to a French infantry division stationed near Verdun. Sent to halt the German drive to Paris in 1918, the division participated in the decisive counterattack of July and tracked the routed Germans through Belgium. Then, “unwarned,” Bowerman and his comrades were “plunged into … a life of peace.” Into this life, he writes, they walked “bewildered,” like “men fearing ambush.”

This remarkable chronicle of one young man’s rite of passage is destined to become a classic in the literature of the Great War.

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Dangerous Work
Diary of an Arctic Adventure
Arthur Conan Doyle
University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 1880 a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the “first real outstanding adventure” of his life, taking a berth as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the Hope. The voyage took him to unknown regions, showered him with dramatic and unexpected experiences, and plunged him into dangerous work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He tested himself, overcame the hardships, and, as he wrote later, “came of age at 80 degrees north latitude.”

Conan Doyle’s time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.
 
Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time in a beautiful facsimile edition that reproduces Conan Doyle’s notebook pages in his own elegant hand, accompanied by his copious illustrations. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the facsimile and annotated transcript of the diary, the volume contains photographs of the Hope, its captain, and a young Conan Doyle on deck with its officers; two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey.
 
To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: “You stand on the very brink of the unknown,” he declared, “and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.” Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.

A special limited, numbered edition of the clothbound book is also available. In addition, a text-only e-book edition is published as Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, Text-only Edition.

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Dangerous Work
Diary of an Arctic Adventure, Text-only Edition
Arthur Conan Doyle
University of Chicago Press, 2012

This e-book features the complete text found in the print edition of Dangerous Work, without the illustrations or the facsimile reproductions of Conan Doyle's notebook pages.

In 1880 a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the “first real outstanding adventure” of his life, taking a berth as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the Hope. The voyage took him to unknown regions, showered him with dramatic and unexpected experiences, and plunged him into dangerous work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He tested himself, overcame the hardships, and, as he wrote later, “came of age at 80 degrees north latitude.”
 
Conan Doyle’s time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.
 
Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the transcript of the diary, the e-book contains two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey.
 
To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: “You stand on the very brink of the unknown,” he declared, “and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.” Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.
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Dear World
Contemporary Uses of the Diary
Kylie Cardell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Where has the personal diary gone—and what forms has it taken—in the digital age? From the diary spaces of reality television and the how-to diary and its audience of self-helpers, in the emerging genre of the graphic diary or the online diaries of sex bloggers, in the published diaries of war correspondents or the urgent personal writing of Arab women under conflict, this book explores a new wave in diary publication and production. It also provides a fresh look at the diary as a contemporary form of autobiography.
            In Dear World, Kylie Cardell is sensitive to how changes to our notions of privacy and the personal—spurred by the central presence the Internet has come to occupy in our daily lives—impact how and why diaries are written, and for whom. She considers what these new uses of the diary tell us about the cultural politics of self-representation in a time of mass attention to (and anxiety about) the personal. Cardell sees the twenty-first-century diary as a vibrant and popular cultural practice as much as a literary form, one that plays a key role in mass-mediated notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and truth. Dear World provides much-needed new attention to the innovation, evolution, and persistence of a familiar yet complex autobiographical mode.
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Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams
Louisa Catherine AdamsEdited by Judith S. Graham, Beth Luey, C. James Taylor, and Margaret A. Hogan
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Adams saga takes a stride through the first half of the nineteenth century, as Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams chronicles her life with John Quincy Adams. Born in London in 1775 to a Maryland merchant and his English wife, Louisa recalls her childhood and education in England and France and her courtship with John Quincy, then U.S. minister to the Netherlands. Married in 1797, Louisa accompanied her husband on his postings to Berlin, St. Petersburg, and London. Her memoirs of Prussia and Russia vividly portray the republican couple in the courts of Europe.

Louisa came to America in 1801 and would share John Quincy’s career as U.S. senator, secretary of state, president, and congressman. Except for his presidency, her diaries for these years have been preserved, and they reveal a reluctant but increasingly canny political wife. Lamentations about loss, including the deaths of three of four children, abound. But here, too, are views of Napoleonic Europe and American sectional disputes, with witty sketches of heroes and scoundrels. John Quincy emerges in a fullness seldom seen—ambitious and exacting, yet passionate, generous, and gallant. Louisa's diaries conclude with her reckoning of an eventful life, which came to a close in 1852.

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Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press

John Adams' Diary, partially published in the 1850's, has proved a quarry of information on the rise of Revolutionary resistance in New England, the debates in the early Continental Congresses, and the diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution; but it has remained unfamiliar to the wider public. "It is an American classic," Zoltán Haraszti said recently, "about which Americans know next to nothing." Yet the Diary’s historical value may well prove secondary to its literary and human interest. Now that it is presented in full, we have for the first time a proper basis for comprehending John Adams—an extraordinary human being, a master of robust, idiomatic language, a diarist in the great tradition.

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams' family, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on the Diary; they are studded with sketches of Adams' associates, which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced, parts and in some cases all of which were omitted from Charles Francis Adams' 19th-century edition.

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Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press

John Adams’s Diary, partially published in the 1850s, has proved a quarry of information on the rise of Revolutionary resistance in New England, the debates in the early Continental Congresses, and the diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution; but it has remained unfamiliar to the wider public. “It is an American classic,” Zoltán Haraszti said recently, “about which Americans know next to nothing.” Yet the Diary’s historical value may well prove secondary to its literary and human interest. Now that it is presented in full, we have for the first time a proper basis for comprehending John Adams—an extraordinary human being, a master of robust, idiomatic language, a diarist in the great tradition.

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams’s family, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on the Diary; they are studded with sketches of Adams’s associates, which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced, parts and in some cases all of which were omitted from Charles Francis Adams’s nineteenth-century edition.

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Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press

John Adams’s Diary, partially published in the 1850s, has proved a quarry of information on the rise of Revolutionary resistance in New England, the debates in the early Continental Congresses, and the diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution; but it has remained unfamiliar to the wider public. “It is an American classic,” Zoltán Haraszti said recently, “about which Americans know next to nothing.” Yet the Diary’s historical value may well prove secondary to its literary and human interest. Now that it is presented in full, we have for the first time a proper basis for comprehending John Adams—an extraordinary human being, a master of robust, idiomatic language, a diarist in the great tradition.

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams’s family, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on the Diary; they are studded with sketches of Adams’ associates, which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced, parts and in some cases all of which were omitted from Charles Francis Adams’s nineteenth-century edition.

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Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press

John Adams’s Diary, partially published in the 1850s, has proved a quarry of information on the rise of Revolutionary resistance in New England, the debates in the early Continental Congresses, and the diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution; but it has remained unfamiliar to the wider public. “It is an American classic,” Zoltán Haraszti said recently, “about which Americans know next to nothing.” Yet the Diary’s historical value may well prove secondary to its literary and human interest. Now that it is presented in full, we have for the first time a proper basis for comprehending John Adams—an extraordinary human being, a master of robust, idiomatic language, a diarist in the great tradition.

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams’s family, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on the Diary; they are studded with sketches of Adams’s associates, which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced, parts and in some cases all of which were omitted from Charles Francis Adams’s nineteenth-century edition.

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Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press

These four volumes begin the publication of the Adams archives, a collection which Edward Everett Hale called a "manuscript history of America in the diaries and correspondence" of a single family.

The Diary, partially published in the 1850's, has proved a quarry of information on the rise of Revolutionary resistance in New England, the debates in the early Continental Congresses, and the diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution; but it has remained unfamiliar to the wider public. "It is an American classic," Mr. Zoltán Haraszti said recently, about which Americans know next to nothing." Actually the Diary's historical value may well prove secondary to its literary and human interest. Now that it is presented in full, we have for the first time a proper basis for comprehending John Adams--an extraordinary human being, a master of robust, idiomatic language, a diarist in the great tradition. From none of the other founders of the Republic do we have anything like a record at once so copious and so intimate.

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams' family but never finished, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on the Diary: they are studded with sketches of Adams' associates which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced. Parts and in some cases all of these sketches were omitted from Charles Francis Adams' nineteenth-century edition.

In 1779 John Adams wrote, "I am but an ordinary Man. The Times alone have destined me to Fame--and even these have not been able to give me, much." Then he added, "Yet some great Events, some cutting Expressions, some mean Hypocrisies, have at Times, thrown this Assemblage of Sloth, Sleep, and littleness into Rage a little like a Lion." Both the ordinary Man and the Lion live on in these volumes.

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Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz
Kaethe Kollwitz
Northwestern University Press, 1988
One of the great German Expressionist artists, Kaethe Kollwitz wrote little of herself. But her diary, kept from 1900 to her death in 1945, and her brief essays and letters express, as well as explain, much of the spirit, wisdom, and internal struggle which was eventually transmuted into her art.
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A Diary from Dixie
Mary Boykin Chesnut
Harvard University Press, 1980
One of the most important documents in southern history, this is a day-by-day diary of the Civil War years. It rings with authenticity while evoking the nostalgia, bitterness, and comedy of the Confederacy.
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Diary of a Citizen Scientist
Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World
Sharman Apt-Russell
Oregon State University Press, 2014
Winner of the 2015John Burroughs Medal, the 2015 WILLA Award for Best Creative Nonfiction, and finalist for the 2015 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards

In the exploding world of citizen science, hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migrations, finding stardust for NASA, and excavating mastodons. The sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology, has begun to shape how research gets done. Non-professionals become acknowledged experts: dentists turn into astronomers and accountants into botanists.
 
Diary of a Citizen Scientist is a timely exploration of the phenomenon of citizen science, told through the lens of nature writer Sharman Apt Russell’s yearlong study of a little-known species, the Western red-bellied tiger beetle. In a voice both humorous and lyrical, Russell recounts her persistent and joyful tracking of an insect she calls “charismatic,” “elegant,” and “fierce.” Patrolling the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, collector’s net in hand, she negotiates the realities of climate change even as she celebrates the beauty of a still-wild and rural landscape.
 
Russell’s self-awareness—of her occasionally-misplaced confidence, her quest to fill in “that blank spot on the map of tiger beetles,” and her desire to become newly engaged in her life—creates a portrait not only of the tiger beetle she tracks, but of the mindset behind self-driven scientific inquiry. Falling in love with the diversity of citizen science, she participates in crowdsourcing programs that range from cataloguing galaxies to monitoring the phenology of native plants, applauds the growing role of citizen science in environmental activism, and marvels at the profusion of projects around the world.
 
Diary of a Citizen Scientist offers its readers a glimpse into the transformative properties of citizen science—and documents the transformation of the field as a whole.
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Diary of a Detour
Lesley Stern
Duke University Press, 2020
Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the dramas and delving into the science. Stern also nudges cancer off center stage by turning to alternative obsessions and pleasures. In seductive writing she describes her life in the garden and kitchen, the hospital and the library, and her travels—down the street to her meditation center, across the border to Mexico, and across the world to Australia. Her immediate world is inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales, lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly.
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Diary of a Philosophy Student
Volume 1, 1926-27
Simone de Beauvoir; Translation by Barbara Klaw; Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret Simons, with the assistance of Marybeth Timmerman
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Simone de Beauvoir, still a teen, began a diary while a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. Written in 1926-27—before Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre—the diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and times and offer critical insights into her early intellectual interests, philosophy, and literary works.

Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world.

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Diary of a Philosophy Student
Volume 2, 1928-29
Simone de Beauvoir; Translation by Barbara Klaw; Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, and Marybeth Timmermann
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Simone de Beauvoir, still a teen, began a diary while a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. Written in 1926-27—before Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre—the diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and times and offer critical insights into her early intellectual interests, philosophy, and literary works.

Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world.

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Diary of a Philosophy Student
Volume 3, 1926-30
Simone de Beauvoir. Translation by Barbara Klaw. Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann. Foreword by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Written between the age of eighteen and twenty-one, the entries in the third volume of Diary of a Philosophy Student take readers into Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts while illuminating the people and ideas swirling around her. The pages offer rare insights into Beauvoir’s intellectual development; her early experiences with love, desire, and freedom; and relationships with friends like Élisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It also presents Beauvoir’s shocking account of Jean-Paul Sartre’s sexual assault of her during their first sexual encounter--a revelation certain to transform views of her life and philosophy.

In addition, the editors include a wealth of important supplementary material. Barbara Klaw provides a detailed consideration of the Diary’s role in the development of Beauvoir’s writing style by exploring her use of metanarrative and other literary techniques, part of a process of literary creation that saw Beauvoir use the notebooks to cultivate her talent. Margaret A. Simons’s essay places the assault by Sartre within an appraisal of Beauvoir’s complicated legacy for #MeToo while suggesting readers engage with the diary through the lens of trauma.

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Diary of a Poem
Andrew Hudgins
University of Michigan Press, 2011

Praise for Andrew Hudgins

"Hudgins . . . [is] one of the few poets of the American South who can be both solemn and sidesplitting in a single poem."
---Publishers Weekly

"Andrew Hudgins is a natural storyteller . . . The surface[s]  of Hudgins's poems---their quirky economy, the sheer music of his prosody---are so right because he goes so deep."
---Washington Post

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Andrew Hudgins's Diary of a Poem is an engaging collection of essays that offers pleasure and profit to its readers. The title essay discusses the author's amusing travails as he attempts to write an ode about intestines, while other pieces explore the poetry of James Agee, Donald Justice, Allen Tate, and other poets, as well as the musician Johnny Winter, who is the subject of a rollicking segment about rock 'n' roll. More seriously, Hudgins writes with lively good humor about his tomato garden, the unread books piled up precipitously around his bed, and the emotional problems that led to an embarrassingly intimate, yet funny encounter with his father-in-law.

Diary of a Poem is lively, charming, often humorous, and a pleasurable read for the general reader and the poetry specialist alike.


Author photo by Jo McCulty

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Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer
Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life
Alberto Ledesma
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In this hybrid memoir, Alberto Ledesma wonders, At what point does a long-time undocumented immigrant become an American in the making? From undocumented little boy to “hyper documented” university professor, Ledesma recounts how even now, he sometimes finds himself reverting to the child he was, recalling his father’s words: “Mijo, it doesn’t matter how good you think your English is, la migra will still get you.”
 
 
Exploring Ledesma’s experiences from immigrant to student to academic, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer presents a humorous, gritty, and multilayered portrait of undocumented immigrant life in urban America. Ledesma’s vignettes about life in the midst of ongoing social trauma give voice to a generation that has long been silent about its struggles. Delving into the key moments of cultural transition throughout his childhood and adulthood—police at the back door waiting to deport his family, the ex-girlfriend who threatens to call INS and report him, and the interactions with law enforcement even after he is no longer undocumented—Ledesma, through his art and his words, provides a glimpse into the psychological and philosophical concerns of undocumented immigrant youth who struggle to pinpoint their identity and community.  
 
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Diary of Almon Harris Thompson
Explorations of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, 1871-1875
Herbert E Gregory
University of Utah Press, 2009
In some respects the most important of the early Colorado River exploration journals, the diaries of Almon Harris Thompson can naturally be divided into three sections: navigation of the Green and Colorado rivers; exploratory traverse from Kanab to the mouth of the Fremont River; and the systematic mapping of central, eastern, and southern Utah and northern Arizona. Thompson’s maps of the Colorado drainage basin, including the first maps of southern Utah and the canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers, place him in the front rank of geographic explorers and they proved invaluable to the later Powell expedition.

Originally published in 1939 as volume seven of the Utah Historical Quarterly, Thompson’s journal is reprinted here for the first time in seventy years. Co-published with the Utah State Historical Society.
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The Diary of Beatrice Webb
Beatrice Webb
Harvard University Press, 1985

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The Diary of Beatrice Webb
Beatrice Webb
Harvard University Press, 1984

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The Diary of Beatrice Webb
Beatrice Webb
Harvard University Press, 1983

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The Diary of Beatrice Webb
Beatrice Webb
Harvard University Press, 1982

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The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon
Benjamin Robert Haydon
Harvard University Press

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The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 1
1817-1838
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1972
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 2
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 2
1838-1843
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1973
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 3
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 3
1844-1847
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1974
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 4
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 4
1848-1852
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1975
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 5
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 5
1853-1856
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1977
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 6
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 6
1857-1860
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1978
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 7
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 7
1861-1862
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1980
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 8
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 8
1863-1864
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1981
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

front cover of The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 9
The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Volume 9
1865-1866
Gayle Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1983
Calvin Fletcher, born in Vermont in 1798, came to Indiana from Ohio in 1821, and in the next forty-five years made a fortune, raised eleven children, and was a pillar of the community. This pioneer Indianapolis lawyer, banker, and philanthropist kept a diary for most of his long life, and in it he recorded both the growth of his family and his community. Whether complaining, criticizing, observing shrewdly, or agonizing, Fletcher emerges as both a complex and unforgettable human being. Each of the set's nine volumes has a preface, chronology, and index. Volume nine includes a cumulative index.
[more]

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Diary of Caroline Seabury
Caroline Seabury
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

In 1854 Caroline Seabury of Brooklyn, New York, set out for Columbus, Mississippi, to teach French at its Institute for Young Ladies.  She lived in Columbus until 1863, through the years of mounting sectional bitterness that preceded the Civil War and through the turmoil and hardships of the war itself.  During that time, her most intimate confidant was her diary.  Discovered in the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society, it is published here for the first time.
    The diary is an illuminating account of southern plantation society and the “peculiar institution” of slavery on the eve of its destruction.  Seabury also records her uneasy attempts to come to terms with her position as an unmarried, white, Northern woman whose job was to educate wealthy, white, Southern girls in a setting seemingly oblivious to the horrors of slavery.  The diary is not simply a chronicle of daily happenings; Seabury concentrates on remarkable events and the memorable feelings and ideas they generate, shaping them into entries that reveal her as an accomplished writer.  She frames her narrative with her journey south in 1854 and the hazardous and exhausting return north through battle lines in 1863.
    Disapproving of slavery, yet deeply attached to friends and her life in Columbus and also painfully conscious of the fragility of her own economic and social position, Seabury condemned privately in her diary the evils that she endured silently in public.  There are striking scenes of plantation life that depict the brutalities of slavery and benumbed responses to them.  Seabury also successfully captures the mood of Mississippi as it changed from a fire-eating appetite to fight the Yankees to a grim apprehension of inexorable defeat.  Most impressive of all is Seabury’s poignantly honest presentation of herself, caught in the middle.

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Diary of Charles Francis Adams
Charles Francis Adams
Harvard University Press, 1964

Third and last of the Adams dynasty of statesmen, Charles Francis Adams followed in his grandfather's and father's footsteps by keeping a diary from youth to old age. With only a few gaps in the earliest years, Charles Francis Adams' diary extends from 1820 to 1880, furnishing a massively detailed and intensely personal record of the writer's life as an undergraduate at Harvard, manager of the Adams family's business affairs, historian and biographer, Free Soil political leader and Republican Congressman, United States minister in London during the Civil War, arbitrator of the Alabama claims at the Geneva Tribunal, and father of a whole constellation of gifted sons.

The Diary of Charles Francis Adams, which is expected to run to at least eighteen volumes under the editorship of Professor and Mrs. Donald, is the second to appear in the Diaries Series of the Belknap Press edition of The Adams Papers. Unlike John Adams' Diary and Autobiography (4 volumes, 1961) and John Quincy Adams' Diary (in preparation), that of Charles Francis Adams has never before been even selectively published. This is partly because the protracted efforts of the family to prepare a satisfactory edition after the writer's death finally broke down under the sheer bulk of the material.

The present two volumes reveal Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man during his college years, in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Webster's Boston law office, and throughout his proonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. A central theme of these volumes is the struggle which raged within young Adams' mind and heart between the warm, poetic heritage of his Southern-born mother and the cold, political, New England legacy of his Adams forebears. The defeat of his father in the 1828 ejection, the tragic death of his older brother, and his marriage to Abigail in 1829, with which the volumes end, were way stations in his course toward making himself a 'New England man." This complex struggle in a young man's mind is one of the most fully chronicled and dramatic episodes in the entire body of the Adams family archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, tinder whose supervision The Adams Papers are being edited.

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Diary of Charles Francis Adams
Charles Francis Adams
Harvard University Press

The period of June 1836 to February 1840, from Charles Francis Adams’s twenty-eighth to thirty-second year, was characterized by his turn from the political activities that had occupied him for the preceding several years. The course of the Van Buren administration he had helped to elect dissatisfied him, the Massachusetts Whig leadership had earned his distrust, positions on political issues that would either echo or oppose those being vigorously espoused by his father, John Quincy Adams, he felt inhibited from avowing publicly. So confronted, Charles found occupation in preparing and expressing himself on economic matters of moment—banking and currency—and moral questions generated by the slavery issue. With increasing effectiveness he employed the lecture platform and the press for the expression of views to which he felt free to attach his name. On all these matters he found his opinions at odds with the prevailing ones held among those prominent in the Boston scene, as John Adams and John Quincy Adams had found before him. Yet, despite a sense of loneliness, so induced, his participation in the varied social life of the city has its place in the Diary.

However, activities in Boston and its environs that provided a focus for the record of the preceding years give way in these volumes to wider scenes made available by train and ship. An extensive journey with his wife by way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal to Niagara and Canada, a visit of some length and interest in Washington, and stays of lesser length in New York City are recounted.

Wide and persistent reading, the theater, numismatics, and the building of a summer home in Quincy also occupied him and are fully reflected in his journal. Family tragedies are not absent from its pages. As the period comes to its close his long and distinguished labors as editor of the family’s papers had begun. A new self-assurance has become evident.

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Diary of Charles Francis Adams
Charles Francis Adams
Harvard University Press

A man’s twenty-seventh year is “critical,” according to Charles Francis Adams. And so his proved to be. Twenty-five at the start of these volumes, Adams had yet to embark on the public career that would mark him a statesman, but by their conclusion he had been drawn into the maelstrom of politics. It was an unwilling plunge, dictated by what both he and his father, John Quincy Adams, regarded as betrayal of the elder Adams by Daniel Webster and his Whigs. Once in, however, he showed himself politically adept.

This diary, kept from January 1833 to June 1836 and hitherto unpublished, has elements of hidden personal drama. Through private meetings and caucuses and newspaper articles signed with pseudonyms, the younger Adams found effective means to carry on political activities in the face of dilemmas posed by his father’s public prominence, his father-in-law’s contrary persuasions, and his own preferences. He emerged with growing self-respect and solid accomplishment as political journalist—his initial vocation.

The diary has fresh disclosures also about the personality of John Quincy Adams, shrewdly assessed by an observer uniquely placed to interpret domestic scenes as well as the greatly waged struggles in Washington against the Southern “slaveocracy” and “gag rules.”

Colorful figures in Boston’s political and social life are finely etched in outspoken appraisals characteristic of the Adamses. The diarist shows acuteness too in comments on books, sermons, paintings, the theater, and opera.

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Diary of Charles Francis Adams
Charles Francis Adams
Harvard University Press

In these volumes the second decade of the sixty-year diary of Charles Francis Adams, the third of the family’s statesmen, is begun. As was true of the two earlier volumes of the Diary, the section appearing here has not before reached print.

Covering the period from Adams’s marriage in September 1829 to the end of 1832, these volumes record the early years of his maturity during which he was seeking to find his vocation. Engaged in the day-to-day management of John Adams’s business interests in Boston, he nevertheless had no inclination toward commerce or the active practice of law. Son and grandson of presidents, proud heir to a name already great and controversial in American politics, he also at this time considered himself “not fitted for the noise of public life.” Dependent for support on his father and father-in-law but determined to maintain his independence, he devoted his available time to a program of studies and writing that would prepare him for a career he hesitated to name but in which he wished distinction. His own public career still years away, he was drawn at this period to the study of American history and his famous grandparents’ papers, an effort that would continue and that would make him the family’s archivist and editor.

These volumes offer manifold opportunities for an enlarged understanding of a complex and able man who was later to assume positions of high responsibility. In addition to furnishing innumerable personal and familial insights, this portion of the diary is of capital importance for the historian of society and culture. Probably no more detailed and faithful record exists of Boston life in the period.

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Diary of Charles Francis Adams
Charles Francis Adams
Harvard University Press

Third and last of the Adams dynasty of statesmen, Charles Francis Adams followed in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps by keeping a diary from youth to old age. With only a few gaps in the earliest years, Charles Francis Adams’s diary extends from 1820 to 1880, furnishing a massively detailed and intensely personal record of the writer’s life as an undergraduate at Harvard, manager of the Adams family’s business affairs, historian and biographer, Free Soil political leader and Republican Congressman, United States minister in London during the Civil War, arbitrator of the Alabama claims at the Geneva Tribunal, and father of a whole constellation of gifted sons.

The Diary of Charles Francis Adams is the second to appear in the Diaries Series of the Belknap Press edition of the Adams Papers. Unlike John Adams’s Diary and Autobiography and John Quincy Adams’s Diary, that of Charles Francis Adams has never before been even selectively published. This is partly because the protracted efforts of the family to prepare a satisfactory edition after the writer’s death finally broke down under the sheer bulk of the material.

The present volume reveals Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man during his college years, in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Webster’s Boston law office, and throughout his prolonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. A central theme of these volumes is the struggle which raged within young Adams’s mind and heart between the warm, poetic heritage of his Southern-born mother and the cold, political, New England legacy of his Adams forebears.

[more]

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Diary of Charles Francis Adams
Charles Francis Adams
Harvard University Press

Third and last of the Adams dynasty of statesmen, Charles Francis Adams followed in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps by keeping a diary from youth to old age. With only a few gaps in the earliest years, Charles Francis Adams’s diary extends from 1820 to 1880, furnishing a massively detailed and intensely personal record of the writer’s life as an undergraduate at Harvard, manager of the Adams family’s business affairs, historian and biographer, Free Soil political leader and Republican Congressman, United States minister in London during the Civil War, arbitrator of the Alabama claims at the Geneva Tribunal, and father of a whole constellation of gifted sons.

The Diary of Charles Francis Adams is the second to appear in the Diaries Series of the Belknap Press edition of the Adams Papers. Unlike John Adams’s Diary and Autobiography and John Quincy Adams’s Diary, that of Charles Francis Adams has never before been even selectively published. This is partly because the protracted efforts of the family to prepare a satisfactory edition after the writer’s death finally broke down under the sheer bulk of the material.

The present volume reveals Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man: in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Webster’s Boston law office, and throughout his prolonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. A central theme of these volumes is the struggle which raged within young Adams’s mind and heart between the warm, poetic heritage of his Southern-born mother and the cold, political, New England legacy of his Adams forebears. The defeat of his father in the 1828 election, the tragic death of his older brother, and his marriage to Abigail in 1829, with which the volume ends, were way stations in his course toward making himself a “New England man.” This complex struggle in a young man’s mind is one of the most fully chronicled and dramatic episodes in the entire body of the Adams family archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, under whose supervision the Adams Papers are being edited.

[more]

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Diary of John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams
Harvard University Press, 1981

These volumes begin the publication of the greatest diary, both in mass and substance, in American History. Recording a span of sixty-eight years, it has been known heretofore only in partial form. When, over a hundred years ago, Charles Francis Adams edited his grandfather’s diary, he chose to omit “the details of common life,” reduce “the moral and religious speculations,” and retain criticisms of others only if they applied to public figures “acting in the same sphere with the writer.”

Now the diary is being published complete for the first time. Starting with the entries of a twelve-year-old, the present volumes cover John Quincy Adams’ formative year—his schooling and travel broad, study at Harvard, and the first months of training for the law. Adams’ six years overseas with his father took him to a half dozen countries, with lengthy stays in Paris, the Netherlands, and St. Petersburg. On his return he stayed for a time in New York, making the acquaintance of influential congressmen. To finish preparing for college, he lived with an aunt and uncle in Haverhill, caught up in a round of social activities. Entering Harvard with junior standing in the spring of 1786, he graduated in fifteen months.

As Adams matured, diary entries became less a dutiful response to a father’s request and more a record of the young man’s perceptive observations and reflections—and thus a rich source for social history. There are accounts of play-going in Paris, evenings with Lafayette and Jefferson, the diversions of rural New England, apprenticeship in a Newburyport law office. And through the eyes of a serious but not unbending student we are given a picture of Harvard in the 1780s.

Candid opinions of preachers, writers, men of affairs, and family members accompany the closest self-scrutiny. Here is a remarkable record of the passage from adolescence to manhood of a precocious and sensitive boy torn by self-doubt and driving himself to fulfill his promise and his parents’ expectations.

[more]

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Diary of John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams
Harvard University Press

Volumes 1 and 2 of the Diary of John Quincy Adams begin the publication of the greatest diary, both in mass and substance, in American History. Recording a span of sixty-eight years, it has been known heretofore only in partial form. When, over a hundred years ago, Charles Francis Adams edited his grandfather’s diary, he chose to omit “the details of common life,” reduce “the moral and religious speculations,” and retain criticisms of others only if they applied to public figures “acting in the same sphere with the writer.”

Now the diary is being published complete for the first time. Starting with the entries of a twelve-year-old, the present volumes cover John Quincy Adams’s formative year—his schooling and travel abroad, study at Harvard, and the first months of training for the law. Adams’s six years overseas with his father took him to a half dozen countries, with lengthy stays in Paris, the Netherlands, and St. Petersburg. On his return he stayed for a time in New York, making the acquaintance of influential congressmen. To finish preparing for college, he lived with an aunt and uncle in Haverhill, caught up in a round of social activities. Entering Harvard with junior standing in the spring of 1786, he graduated in fifteen months.

As Adams matured, diary entries became less a dutiful response to a father’s request and more a record of the young man’s perceptive observations and reflections—and thus a rich source for social history. There are accounts of play-going in Paris, evenings with Lafayette and Jefferson, the diversions of rural New England, apprenticeship in a Newburyport law office. And through the eyes of a serious but not unbending student we are given a picture of Harvard in the 1780s.

Candid opinions of preachers, writers, men of affairs, and family members accompany the closest self-scrutiny. Here is a remarkable record of the passage from adolescence to manhood of a precocious and sensitive boy torn by self-doubt and driving himself to fulfill his promise and his parents’ expectations.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Diary of John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams
Harvard University Press

Volumes 1 and 2 of the Diary of John Quincy Adams begin the publication of the greatest diary, both in mass and substance, in American History. Recording a span of sixty-eight years, it has been known heretofore only in partial form. When, over a hundred years ago, Charles Francis Adams edited his grandfather’s diary, he chose to omit “the details of common life,” reduce “the moral and religious speculations,” and retain criticisms of others only if they applied to public figures “acting in the same sphere with the writer.”

Now the diary is being published complete for the first time. Starting with the entries of a twelve-year-old, the present volumes cover John Quincy Adams’s formative year—his schooling and travel abroad, study at Harvard, and the first months of training for the law. Adams’s six years overseas with his father took him to a half dozen countries, with lengthy stays in Paris, the Netherlands, and St. Petersburg. On his return he stayed for a time in New York, making the acquaintance of influential congressmen. To finish preparing for college, he lived with an aunt and uncle in Haverhill, caught up in a round of social activities. Entering Harvard with junior standing in the spring of 1786, he graduated in fifteen months.

As Adams matured, diary entries became less a dutiful response to a father’s request and more a record of the young man’s perceptive observations and reflections—and thus a rich source for social history. There are accounts of play-going in Paris, evenings with Lafayette and Jefferson, the diversions of rural New England, apprenticeship in a Newburyport law office. And through the eyes of a serious but not unbending student we are given a picture of Harvard in the 1780s.

Candid opinions of preachers, writers, men of affairs, and family members accompany the closest self-scrutiny. Here is a remarkable record of the passage from adolescence to manhood of a precocious and sensitive boy torn by self-doubt and driving himself to fulfill his promise and his parents’ expectations.

[more]

front cover of The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams
The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams
A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890
Minoa D. Uffelman
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
In 1863, while living in Clarksville, Tennessee, Martha Ann Haskins, known to friends
and family as Nannie, began a diary. The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern
Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890
provides valuable insights into
the conditions in occupied Middle Tennessee. A young, elite Confederate sympathizer,
Nannie was on the cusp of adulthood with the expectation of becoming a mistress in
a slaveholding society. The war ended this prospect, and her life was forever changed.
Though this is the first time the diaries have been published in full, they are well known
among Civil War scholars, and a voice-over from the wartime diary was used repeatedly
in Ken Burns’s famous PBS program The Civil War.

Sixteen-year-old Nannie had to come to terms with Union occupation very early in
the war. Amid school assignments, young friendship, social events, worries about her
marital prospects, and tension with her mother, Nannie’s entries also mixed information
about battles, neighbors wounded in combat, U.S. Colored troops, and lawlessness in the
surrounding countryside. Providing rare detail about daily life in an occupied city, Nannie’s
diary poignantly recounts how she and those around her continued to fight long after
the war was over—not in battles, but to maintain their lives in a war-torn community.

Though numerous women’s Civil War diaries exist, Nannie’s is unique in that she also
recounts her postwar life and the unexpected financial struggles she and her family experienced
in the post-Reconstruction South. Nannie’s diary may record only one woman’s
experience, but she represents a generation of young women born into a society based
on slavery but who faced mature adulthood in an entirely new world of decreasing farm
values, increasing industrialization, and young women entering the workforce. Civil War
scholars and students alike will learn much from this firsthand account of coming-of-age
during the Civil War.

Minoa D. Uffelman is an associate professor of history at Austin Peay State University.
Ellen Kanervo is professor emerita of communications at Austin Peay State University.
Phyllis Smith is retired from the U.S. Army and currently teaches high school science in
Montgomery County, Tennessee. Eleanor Williams is the Montgomery County, Tennessee,
historian.
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The Diary of Olga Romanov
Royal Witness to the Russian Revolution
Helen Azar
Westholme Publishing, 2014
The First English Translation of the Wartime Diaries of the Eldest Daughter of Nicholas II, the Last Tsar of Russia, with Additional Documents of the Period
In August 1914, Russia entered World War I, and with it, the imperial family of Tsar Nicholas II was thrust into a conflict they would not survive. His eldest child, Olga Nikolaevna, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had begun a diary in 1905 when she was ten years old and kept writing her thoughts and impressions of day-to-day life as a grand duchess until abruptly ending her entries when her father abdicated his throne in March 1917. Held at the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow, Olga’s diaries during the wartime period have never been translated into English until this volume. At the outset of the war, Olga and her sister Tatiana worked as nurses in a military hospital along with their mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga’s younger sisters, Maria and Anastasia, visited the infirmaries to help raise the morale of the wounded and sick soldiers. The strain was indeed great, as Olga records her impressions of tending to the officers who had been injured and maimed in the fighting on the Russian front. Concerns about her sickly brother, Aleksei, abound, as well those for her father, who is seen attempting to manage the ongoing war. Gregori Rasputin appears in entries, too, in an affectionate manner as one would expect of a family friend. While the diaries reflect the interests of a young woman, her tone grows increasingly serious as the Russian army suffers setbacks, Rasputin is ultimately murdered, and a popular movement against her family begins to grow. At the point Olga ends her writing in 1917, the author continues the story by translating letters and impressions from family intimates, such as Anna Vyrubova, as well as the diary kept by Nicholas II himself. Finally, once the imperial family has been put under house arrest by the revolutionaries, we follow events through observations by Alexander Kerensky, head of the initial Provisional Government, these too in English translation for the first time. Olga would offer no further personal writings, as she and the rest of her family were crowded into the basement of a house in the Urals and shot to death in July 1918.
The Diary of Olga Romanov: Royal Witness to the Russian Revolution, translated and introduced by scientist and librarian Helen Azar, and supplemented with additional primary source material, is a remarkable document of a young woman who did not choose to be part of a royal family and never exploited her own position, but lost her life simply because of what her family represented.
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Diary of Our Fatal Illness
Charles Bardes
University of Chicago Press, 2017
This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man’s son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.
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The Diary of Serepta Jordan
A Southern Woman's Struggle with War and Family, 1857–1864
Minoa Uffelman
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

Discovered in a smokehouse in the mid-1980s, the diary of Serepta Jordan provides a unique window into the lives of Confederates living in occupied territory in upper middle Tennessee. A massive tome, written in a sturdy store ledger, the diary records every day from the fall of 1857 to June 1864. In this abridged version, Jordan reports local news, descriptions of her daily activities, war news, and social life. Orphaned at twelve, Jordan—her first name shortened to “Rep” by family and friends—lived in bustling New Providence (now part of Clarksville), Tennessee, on the banks of the Red River. Well educated by private tutors, Jordan read widely, followed politics, and  was a skilled seamstress interested in the latest fashions.

Jordan’s descendants worked tirelessly toward ensuring the publication of this diary. In its carefully annotated pages, readers will learn about the years of sectional conflict leading up to the war, the diarist’s dizzying array of daily activities, and her attitudes toward those she encountered. Jordan takes a caustic tone toward Union occupiers, whom she accused of “prancing round on their fine horses.” She routinely refers to the USA as “Lincolndom” and describes her contempt toward the African Americans in the blue uniforms of the Union army. She seems to have also harbored a bitter resentment toward the “elites” on the other side of the river in Clarksville. This one-of-a-kind volume not only adds a distinct female voice to the story of the Civil War, but also a unique new picture of the slow but steady disintegration of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

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The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky
University of Illinois Press, 2006

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Florida Territory in 1844
The Diary of Master Edward Clifford Anderson, USN
Edward Anderson, edited by W. Stanley Hoole
University of Alabama Press, 1977

Edward Anderson's diary covers his service in Florida Territory from March 16 to December 31, 1844 during the Navy mission in Florida to protect live oak and pine forests on government land from poachers. 

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Hero of the Angry Sky
The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace
David S. Ingalls
Ohio University Press, 2012

Hero of the Angry Sky draws on the unpublished diaries, correspondence, informal memoir, and other personal documents of the U.S. Navy’s only flying “ace” of World War I to tell his unique story. David S. Ingalls was a prolific writer, and virtually all of his World War I aviation career is covered, from the teenager’s early, informal training in Palm Beach, Florida, to his exhilarating and terrifying missions over the Western Front. This edited collection of Ingalls’s writing details the career of the U.S. Navy’s most successful combat flyer from that conflict.

While Ingalls’s wartime experiences are compelling at a personal level, they also illuminate the larger, but still relatively unexplored, realm of early U.S. naval aviation. Ingalls’s engaging correspondence offers a rare personal view of the evolution of naval aviation during the war, both at home and abroad. There are no published biographies of navy combat flyers from this period, and just a handful of diaries and letters in print, the last appearing more than twenty years ago. Ingalls’s extensive letters and diaries add significantly to historians’ store of available material.

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A Hero Perished
The Diary and Selected Letters of Nile Kinnick
Paul Baender
University of Iowa Press, 1992

A Hero Perished tells Nile Kinnick's story. This grandson of an Iowa governor, the son of parents who disciplined him to strive for his measure of greatness, became a Heisman Trophy winner and national celebrity through a combination of talent and circumstance. Following his college successes, Kinnick began legal study to prepare for a political career, but with the approach of war he entered the Navy Air Corps to refashion himself as a fighter pilot. Assigned to the carrier USS Lexington on its premier cruise, he took off in a defective plane—and his death shocked a nation grown almost used to tragic loss.

For the first time, Kinnick tells his own tale through his engaging letters—all but one previously unpublished—and his diary, printed in its entirety for the first time. The result is a human, intimate look at the true person behind the myth, revealing both his foibles and his essential principles. A Hero Perished also includes a definitive text of Kinnick's moving Heisman Award acceptance speech and his impassioned commencement supper address, calling on the new Iowa graduates to achieve moral courage in a time of depression and war.

An illuminating comment on a time and attitude that have passed, A Hero Perished is of and about a football player, but it is not a football book—it is far more. This volume displays Kinnick—who was, despite his great gifts and achievements, a vulnerable and decent young man—in a time of great change and peril when a phase of our culture was passing away.

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Hung Jury
The Diary of a Menendez Juror
Hazel Thornton
Temple University Press, 2017

More than two decades after serving as a juror on the high-profile seven-month murder trial People v. Erik Galen Menendez, Hazel Thornton updates her book Hung Jury with a new preface and a postscript essay of observations about the Menendez brothers’ second trial. Includes psychological commentary by Lawrence S. Wrightsman and Amy J. Posey, and legal commentary by Alan Scheflin.

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In the Open
Diary of a Homeless Alcoholic
Timothy E. Donohue
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Compelling, raw, and painfully self-aware, In the Open describes an existence most people can barely imagine. A first-hand account of one man's struggle with homelessness and alcoholism, this diary records a world full of physical degradation and despair that is not without unpredictable moments of striking beauty.

Donohue's experiences are brutal, but his perceptions are poetic. This account of an intelligent and sensitive man in the grip of alcoholism and homelessness challenges our perceptions of those on the margins of American contemporary life.

"Donohue recorded this often-moving account during a four-year period of homelessness caused by his alcoholism. . . . There are many brilliant observations here on a range of topics, including human nature, technology, and capitalism. . . . Donohue's life on the fringe also provides an inside look at the homeless system of overnight shelters, labor offices, and food stamp providers. But, somehow, in spite of all the negatives, a hopeful book emerges."—Booklist

"A startlingly original book. In this confessional age, Donohue's diary becomes a different sort of tell-all, a palimpsest that forces us to extract the author from his own writing. . . . Donohue comes to resemble Swift's Gulliver"—Nicholas Nesson, Boston Phoenix

"Donohue punctuates his account of 'domiciling within the black walls of a mosquito-infested night' with rambling metaphysical asides in the style of an eighteenth-century philosophe."—Molly McQuade, Lingua Franca

"Despite hunger, homelessness, dead-end jobs and abusive drinking, what is most striking about Donohue is his amazing optimism and endurance."—Patrick Markee, Nation

"Donohue is a gifted writer. . . . But what gives [his diary] the breath of life is that it is written by an artist."—Alec Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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Law in a Lawless Land
Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia
Michael Taussig
University of Chicago Press, 2005
A modern nation in a state of total disorder, Colombia is an international flashpoint—wracked by more than half a century of civil war, political conflict, and drug-trade related violence—despite a multibillion dollar American commitment that makes it the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

Law in a Lawless Land offers a rare and penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's present peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, anthropologist Michael Taussig chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members. Armed with automatic weapons and computer-generated lists of names and photographs, the paramilitaries have the tacit support of the police and even many of the desperate townspeople, who are seeking any solution to the crushing uncertainty of violence in their lives. Concentrating on everyday experience, Taussig forces readers to confront a kind of terror to which they have become numb and complacent.

"If you want to know what it is like to live in a country where the state has disintegrated, this moving book by an anthropologist well known for his writings on murderous Colombia will tell you."—Eric Hobsbawm
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Making Peace with Spain
The Diary of Whitelaw Reid, September-December, 1898
By Whitelaw Reid; edited by H. Wayne Morgan
University of Texas Press, 1965

Whitelaw Reid, according to H. Wayne Morgan, was a “leading newspaperman, more than an occasional diplomat, a power in his party’s politics, a supporter of some of the best in his era’s culture . . . Of all his legacy, perhaps the record he left of his part in the Peace of Paris is the most significant and most interesting. It not only reveals the workings of his mind and of the peace conference, but also suggests the complex currents that carried his country into the realities of world power in the twentieth century.”

In editing Reid’s diary, Morgan used much material pertinent to the Paris Peace Conference of 1898, employed here for the first time. This material is a rich assortment of archival matter: the Reid Papers, the John Hay Papers, the John Bassett Moore Papers, and the McKinley Papers, in the Library of Congress; the Peace Commission records, in the National Archives; and unpublished materials in the Central Files of the Department of State.

Whitelaw Reid, as a war correspondent during the Civil War, as clerk of the House Military Affairs Committee, and later as a successor to Horace Greeley on the Tribune, gained access to the leaders of his times and insight into their actions. In 1889 he was appointed U.S. Minister to France by Harrison, and in 1892 he had the dubious honor of being chosen as Harrison’s running mate on the losing presidential ticket. An influential friend and supporter of President McKinley and an occasional advisor to him, Reid was no stranger to politics and to international diplomacy when McKinley appointed him to the Peace Commission that wrote the treaty concluding the Spanish-American War. As a matter of fact, Reid’s opinion reflected the administration’s attitude of expansionism, the policy of Manifest Destiny—or “imperialism,” as it was later called.

Reid’s diary records the details of the sessions of the Joint Peace Commission of Paris from September through a large part of December of 1898. His day-by-day entries reveal the complexity of issues to be considered, the tactics of both the Spanish and the American Commissions in attempting to gain advantage for their respective governments, the interplay of the personalities of the once-proud Spaniards and the brash Americans, the political objectives influencing the points of view of the various members, and the maneuverings that brought about the final resolution of debated issues.

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A Month at the Front
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier
Unknown Soldier
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
In July 1917, a young man in the 12th East Surrey Regiment kept a journal of his experiences at the front. This account is narrated with a keen sense of observation, bringing to life the sights, sounds, smells, and horrors of war. The anonymous author candidly describes his daily life: dodging shells to fetch meals from the rations cart; his regiment lost on a march, straying perilously near enemy lines; the selfishness of his commanding officer; the daily distribution of rum; the soar of shells above his head; communicating by sign language with a captured German soldier living in his trench; catching sleep in snatches of ten or fifteen minutes; and always, the endless mud. The young soldier describes how his comrades gradually fall one by one, until he and three remaining fellow soldiers are captured by the enemy, an event that abruptly ends the narrative.A Month at the Front offers a fresh and personal perspective on war. The manuscript, acquired by the Bodleian Library, is an authentic firsthand account from a young, anonymous soldier. It is a poignant and moving story of a young man thrust into fatal circumstances.
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A Month at the Front
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2006
From The Things They Carried and Platoon to today’s documentaries of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ordeals of wartime soldiers are gripping, morally complex narratives of human strength and frailty. A Month at the Front offers another fresh and personal perspective on war. Recently acquired by the Bodleian Library, it is a first-hand account of a young and anonymous British soldier fighting in the frontline trenches of the First World War.

A Month at the Front chronicles one month in the life of a soldier from the 12th East Surrey regiment, and the economical yet powerful narrative vividly brings to life the sights, sounds, and horrors of war. “The first night passed uneventfully, except that we were shelled”—so begins the young man in spare prose, and the quiet drama unfolds from there. Constant bombings and the sobering landscape of war—“It was nothing unusual to come across . . . a dead comrade lying waiting for burial”—are occasionally relieved by humorous events such as the discovery that a troop of advancing Germans was “nothing more than few short willow shrubs waving about in the breeze.” The young soldier describes how his comrades gradually fall one by one, until he and three remaining fellow soldiers are captured by the enemy, an event that abruptly ends the narrative.

A Month at the Front is not penned by a famous author, nor does it claim to offer any broad perspective. Rather, it is the lone voice of an unknown young man thrust into fatal circumstances.
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Nels Anderson’s World War I Diary
Allan Kent Powell
University of Utah Press, 2013

Nels Anderson’s World War I Diary provides a rare glimpse into the wartime experiences of one of the most well-respected sociologists of the twentieth century, the renowned author of The Hobo (1920) and Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (1942). Anderson, a keen observer of people, places, and events his entire life, joined the U.S. Army in 1918 at the age of 29 and was sent to Europe to fight as part of the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) under General Pershing. Because keeping a journal was strongly discouraged among American forces during WWI, particularly among the rank-and-file soldiers, Anderson’s diary stands as a rare gem. Furthermore, it is the only known account of war service during WWI by a member of the LDS Church. Anderson joined the Mormon faith after accepting the hospitality of an extended Mormon ranching family during his travels throughout the American West as a working hobo.

Anderson’s accounts of the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives are particularly remarkable given the challenges of keeping a detailed journal amidst the chaos and suffering of the war’s Western Front. His insights into the depravity and callousness of war are buttressed with intimate human portraits of those to whom he was closest. The war years provided many formative experiences that would prove to have a lasting influence on Anderson’s views regarding the working poor, authority, and human values; this would come to bear heavily on his later work as a pioneering sociologist at the University of Chicago, where he helped establish participant observation as a research method. The many introspective entries contained in this volume will be of  reat interest to military historians and history buffs as well as to those in the social sciences looking to find the intellectual origins of Anderson’s later work in the burgeoning field of sociology.

Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for Journals, Memoirs, and Letters. 

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On the Mormon Frontier
The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844-1889
Juanita Brooks
University of Utah Press, 2009
Hosea Stout was a participant in the mainstream movement as the newly formed Mormon Church expanded its membership and range. He held numerous positions of responsibility in church, civic, and governmental organizations, including as officer of the militias of Illinois and Utah, attorney general of the state of Deseret and the territory of Utah, and president of the house of the Utah Territorial Legislature. Such positions gave Stout the opportunity to observe and record events of great moment in Mormon history that were outside the reach of many diarists. His records of the territorial legislature offer a more informative and detailed account of the affairs of the legislative assembly than even the official journals of that body. Yet Stout also imbues his diaries with a sense of the familiar, recounting moving experiences from his daily life.

This edition of On the Mormon Frontier presents Stout’s diary in a single volume, proving that it continues to be an essential work in the study of Mormon and American history.
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A Player and a Gentleman
The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century U.S. American Actor
Edited by Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Hardworking actor, playwright, and stage manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) was also a prolific diarist. For fifteen years Watkins regularly recorded the plays he saw, the roles he performed, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. Performing across the U.S., Watkins collaborated with preeminent performers and producers, recording his successes and failures as well as his encounters with celebrities such as P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lucy Stone. His is the only known diary of substantial length and scope written by a U.S. actor before the Civil War—making Watkins, essentially, the antebellum equivalent of Samuel Pepys. Theater historians Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs have selected, edited, and annotated excerpts from the diary in an edition that offers a vivid glimpse of how ordinary people like Watkins lived, loved, struggled, and triumphed during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. The selections in A Player and a Gentleman are drawn from a more expansive digital archive of the complete diary. The book, like its digital counterpart, will richly enhance our knowledge of antebellum theater culture and daily life in the U.S. during this period.

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Sailor Of The Air
The 1917-1919 Letters and Diary of USN CMM/A Irving Edward Sheely
Lawrence D. Sheely
University of Alabama Press, 1993

In the winter of 1917, with most of the world at war, twenty-three-year-old Irving Edward Sheely of Albany, New York, enlisted in Naval Aviation and began his training at Pensacola Naval Air Station. When Congress declared ware on Germany on April 6, 1917, the combined strength of aviation within the Navy and Marine Corps was 48 officers, 239 enlisted men, 54 airplanes, one airship, and one air station.

Lieutenant Kenneth Whiting immediately recruited seven volunteer officers and 122 volunteer enlisted men with orders to go directly to France as the First Aeronautical Detachment. By June, the first organized contingent of American forces arrived in the combat zone at St. Nazaire, France—woefully unprepared to take on the mighty submarine force of Imperial Germany. Among this small detachment was Landsman Machinist Mate Second Class Irving E. Sheely.
Trained by American and foreign officers, using both American and foreign aircraft, Sheely learned aviation and aviation combat at the heart of the action. He served as Observer/Gunlayer with Navy Lieutenant Kenneth MacLeish as pilot, and the two participated in some of the first antisubmarine air patrols in history, including a sea landing to rescue a downed crew. While at Clermont-Ferrand, Sheely developed an improved bombsight, for which he was praised by MacLeish. Following the Armistice, Sheely participated in the closing of the Navy base at Eastleigh, England, and returned to the United States in November 1918.
Utilizing Sheely’s correspondence and meticulous diary spanning 19 months of training and service—mostly on foreign soil and in foreign aircraft—this book presents an unusual first person account of the wartime experience of naval aviation in World War I. Sheely’s letters and diary describe the many deprivations and inadequacies of the aviation program and show clearly the sacrifices made by the officers and enlisted men. He supplied for himself items, such as helmet and goggles, that later servicemen would expect the military to issue. In addition to wartime description, the letters reveal the young man’s concern for his family and his interest in home, so a very human story emerges.
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Samuel Pepys in the Diary
Percival Hunt
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958

In this work, the reader experiences the life of Samuel Pepys and his freinds, great and small, in seventeenth-century London. We see great men of war, business and letters, enhanced by Percival Hunt’s comprehensive bibliography.

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Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson
A Diary, 1930-1933
Lorenzo J. Greene, Edited & Intro by Arvarh E. Strickland
University of Missouri Press, 1996

In the summer of 1930, Lorenzo Johnston Greene, a graduate of Howard University and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, became a book agent for the man with the undisputed title of "Father of Negro History," Carter G. Woodson. With little more than determination, Greene, along with four Howard University students, traveled throughout the South and Southeast selling books published by Woodson's Associated Publishers. Their dual purpose was to provide needed funds for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and to promote the study of African American history. Greene returned east by way of Chicago, and, for a time, he settled in Philadelphia, selling books there and in the nearby cities of Delaware and New Jersey. He left Philadelphia in 1931 to conduct a survey in Washington, D.C., of firms employing and not employing black workers.

From 1930 until 1933, when Greene began teaching at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson provides a unique firsthand account of conditions in African American communities during the Great Depression. Greene describes in the diary, often in lyrical terms, the places and people he visited. He provides poignant descriptions of what was happening to black professional and business people, plus working-class people, along with details of high school facilities, churches, black business enterprises, housing, and general conditions in communities. Greene also gives revealing accounts of how the black colleges were faring in 1930.

Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson offers important glimpses into the private thoughts of a young man of the 1930s, a developing intellectual and scholar. Greene's diary also provides invaluable insights into the personality of Carter Woodson that are not otherwise available. This fascinating and comprehensive view of black America during the early thirties will be a welcome addition to African American studies.

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A Soldier in World War I
The Diary of Elmer W. Sherwood
Robert H. Ferrell
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004
In April 1917 a sophomore at Indiana University, inspired by his grandfather's service in the Union army during the Civil War, left school and enlisted with a National Guard unit in Indianapolis that became the 150th Field Artillery Regiment. Before long the young man, Elmer W. Sherwood, found himself fighting in France. Sherwood kept a diary of his time overseas, including his experiences in the army of occupation following the war's end. A Soldier in World War I: The Diary of Elmer W. Sherwood captures the words of the Hoosier as he wrote them on the front lines. The book also includes a shipboard diary Sherwood sent home from France shortly after his arrival, which appeared in his hometown newspaper.
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Truman in the White House
The Diary of Eben A. Ayers
Edited & Commentaries by Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 1991

As assistant press secretary to President Harry S. Truman, Eben A. Ayers brought with him twenty-six years of experience as a newspaperman.  He knew when he had a good story and knew how to record it.  His private diary, which he kept unbeknownst to his associates, tells the inside story of the Truman White House clearly, colorfully, and with an acute sense of history.

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The Unloved
From the Diary of Perla S.
Arnost Lustig
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction

Perla S. is a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who, while interred in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, becomes a prostitute. Capturing Perla's voice through a series of diary entries, Arnost Lustig shows how she maintains her integrity, honesty, and hope amidst lies and horror. This first paperback edition has been extensively revised and expanded by the author.
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Wartime in Burma
A Diary, January to June 1942
Theippan Maung Wa
Ohio University Press, 2009

This diary, begun after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and covering the invasion of Burma up to June 1942, is a moving account of the dilemmas faced by the well-loved and prolific Burmese author Theippan Maung Wa (a pseudonym of U Sein Tin) and his family. At the time of the Japanese invasion, U Sein Tin was deputy secretary in the Ministry of Home and Defense Affairs. An Oxford-trained member of the Indian Civil Service, working for the British administration on the eve of the invasion, he lived with his wife and three small children in Rangoon.

Wartime in Burma is a stirring memoir that presents a personal account of U Sein Tin’s feelings about the war, his anxiety for the safety of his family, the bombing of Rangoon, and what happened to them during the next six chaotic months of the British retreat. The author and his family leave Rangoon to live in a remote forest in Upper Burma with several other Burmese civil servants, their staff, and valuable possessions—rich pickings for robbers. His diary ends abruptly on June 5, his forty-second birthday; U Sein Tin was murdered on June 6 by a gang of Burmese bandits. The diary pages, scattered on the floor of the house, were rescued by his wife and eventually published in Burma in 1966. What survives is a unique account that shines new light on the military retreat from Burma.

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Where the Wild Animals Is Plentiful
Diary of an Alabama Fur Trader's Daughter, 1912-1914
May Jordan
University of Alabama Press, 2006

This rare find--a journal of a young backwoods woman--provides a unique picture of rural life in southwestern Alabama early in the 20th century.

"I am a little Alabama girl living on the frontier where the wild animals is plentiful," wrote May Jordan in 1912. During the hunting season her father traveled Washington County buying furs, and May--already 23--accompanied him on two of these trips, cooking meals, helping out with the business, and recording their experiences.

May's diary of these trips from December 1912 to March 1914 describes the routine of the fur trade and provides a vivid portrait of wilderness travel and social customs. Through May's eyes, readers can experience the sights and sounds of pine forests and swamps, the difficulty of wading through waist-deep mud, and the neighborliness of the people living in this isolated area. May also shares both the solace of religious faith and her love of laughter as reflected in the jokes she records.

Elisa Moore Baldwin provides an introduction that traces Jordan family history and describes economic, social, and political conditions during the period. Baldwin also includes annotations based on court records, census rolls, and other primary sources and photographs of many of the characters in May's narrative to provide a vivid picture of the times. Because few first-person accounts exist of the life of poor whites, this diary will be invaluable to students of southern and women's history; no comparable work exists for this part of Alabama during this era. May's journal takes us to another world and teaches us about the lively human spirit in the face of hardship and loneliness.
 

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A Woman's Civil War
A Diary with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862
Cornelia Peake McDonald; Edited, with an Introduction by Minrose C. Gwin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
     On the night of March 11, 1862, as the heavy tramp of Confederate marching troops died away in the distance—her husband’s regiment among them—Cornelia Peake McDonald began her diary of events in war-torn Winchester, Virginia.
     McDonald’s story of the Civil War records a personal and distinctly female battle of her own—a southern woman’s lonely struggle in the midst of chaos to provide safety and shelter for herself and her children. For McDonald, history is what happens “inside the house.” She relates the trauma that occurs when the safety of the home is disrupted and destroyed by the forces of war—when women and children are put out of their houses and have nowhere to go.
     Whether she is describing a Union soldier’s theft of her Christmas cakes, the discovery of a human foot in her garden, or the death of her baby daughter, McDonald’s story of the Civil War at home is compelling and disturbing. Her tremendous determination and unyielding spirit in the face of the final collapse of her world is testimony to a woman’s will to preserve her family and her own sense of purpose as a “rebel” against all that she regarded as tyrannical and brutal in war itself.
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Writing Japan's War in New Guinea
The Diary of Tamura Yoshikazu
Victoria Eaves-Young
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Tamura Yoshikazu is destined to die on the alien shores of the New Guinea warzone. Devoid of family contact, perplexed by the unfamiliarity of his environment, deprived of even meagre amenities and faced with the spectre of debilitating illness and starvation, this solitary soldier commenced a diary in the early part of 1943. Employed in the hard labour of building airstrips, he is ground down by tedium, disheartened by the now dysfunctional military hierarchy, consumed by grief at the meaningless deaths of comrades, and stripped of any chance of being involved in an aspect of war that he considers heroic and meaningful. Profoundly unsettled by all that appears to be at odds with the *kokutai* ideology, Tamura employs strategies through the vehicle of his diary to enable him to remain committed to the pathway of death on behalf of the Emperor.
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