Journal and Letter Book of Nicholas Buckeridge, 1651-1654 was first published in 1973. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Nicholas Buckeridge was an employee of the East India Company from the 1640’s into the 1660’s, and his journal and letter book provide an account of English trade with India, Persia and East Africa in the mid-seventeenth century, a period for which few records of this kind have survived. Many logbooks and journals of the early years of the company have been preserved at the India office but materials for the general period of 1645 to 1660 are very scant. Buckeridge describes the places he visited, the problems of trading, the goods traded, and some of the prices obtained in the trading. The journal complements the early records of the Assada plantation venture of the East India Company and also provides a picture of the perilous life of a merchantman in his endeavors for the company. The editor, a former rare-book librarian at the University of Minnesota, provides a general introduction as well as brief introductions to each of the eighteen pieces from the letter book and journal. There are a facsimile reproduction of a page from the Buckeridge account and two maps. This is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

Eliza Frances “Fanny” Andrews (1840–1931) was born into south-ern aristocracy in Washington, Georgia. The acclaimed author of Journal of a Georgia Girl: 1864–1865, she was an exceptional woman who went on to become a journalist, writer, teacher, and world-renowned botanist.  In 1870, as Andrews was working on her first novel, she embarked on a visit to wealthy “Yankee kin” in Newark, New Jersey. The trip had a profound effect on her life, as she was astonished by the contrasts between North and South. This previously unpublished segment of Andrews’s writings begins with her New Jersey sojourn and ends with her mother’s death in 1872. It is remarkable for the light it sheds on the social and economic transformations of the Reconstruction era, particularly as they were perceived and experienced by a southern woman.

Andrews was an intelligent, sharp-witted, and skilled observer, and these qualities shine through her engaging memoir. She records her reactions to Newark society and the economic base on which it stood, comparing southern gentility and agriculture to northern brusqueness and industry. Moreover, while the diary reveals clearly the social and cultural attitudes of aristocratic southerners of the period, it also foreshadows the beginning of change as, for example, a visit to a factory opens Andrews’s eyes to the advantages of the new economy. She also recounts her frustrations with the role of southern women, exalted on the one hand but severely restricted on the other. These stark contrasts and Andrews’s own mixed feelings give the diary much of its power.

Also included in this volume are six of Andrews’s magazine and newspaper articles that appeared in the national press around the time she was keeping this journal. Taken together, her private and public writings from this period show a maturing nineteenth-century woman confronting a culture turned upside down in the new world of the Reconstruction-era South.

Andrews’s memoir, with accompanying introduction and commentary by Kit Rushing, will appeal to general readers with an interest in the nineteenth-century South as well as to historians of women, the Civil War era, and nineteenth-century America.

The Editor: S. Kittrell Rushing is head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.