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André Michaux in North America
Journals and Letters, 1785–1797
Translated from the French, Edited, and Annotated by Charlie Williams, Eliane M. Norman, and Walter Kingsley Taylor
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Journals and letters, translated from the original French, bring Michaux’s work to modern readers and scientists
 
Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.
 
Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux’s American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day.
 
To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships—debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck—that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.
 
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The Bridges of Vietnam
From the Journals of a U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer
Fred L. Edwards Jr.
University of North Texas Press, 2000

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1982

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The final volume of this splendid edition contains a comprehensive index to the contents of the preceding volumes—the several thousand letters, the journals, the notes and biographical sketches. The index is prefaced by a generous selection of Byron’s aphorisms, bons mots, and memorable statements, culled by Leslie Marchand from the letters and journals and arranged under subject headings.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1981

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

An enchanting epistolary saga ends with the publication of this volume. Volume XI: ‘For freedom’s battle’ contains the letters Byron wrote from Greece between August 1823 and April 9, 1824, ten days before his death. Also included are over fifty letters dating from 1807 to 1820 that have come to light since Leslie A. Marchand began this project ten years ago.

In the letters from Greece a new set of correspondents appears, and a new tone is apparent. Although occasionally playful, Byron is preoccupied with the revolution and his efforts to unite the Greeks in a common cause despite their discord. His chief correspondents are his business agents in the islands and his banker friend in Genoa, Charles Barry, to whom he writes frank accounts of daily affairs. His letters to Hobhouse and to John Bowring attempt to give a realistic picture of the Greek struggle. To Teresa Guiccioli he writes only short, dutiful postscripts in English to the longer letters addressed to her brother.

Among the additional letters that became available too late to take their chronological place in the earlier volumes are those discovered in 1976, locked in a trunk at Barclays Bank; all but one of these fourteen letters were written to Scrope Davies, Byron’s witty friend and drinking companion.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1980

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

Byron’s brilliant epistolary saga approaches its end in this last full volume of his letters, from early October 1822 to his fateful departure for Greece in July 1823. During these months he was living in Genoa, with Teresa and her father and brother occupying an apartment in his house. Mary Shelley was staying with the Hunts in a house some distance away.

Byron enlarged his circle of English acquaintances, but his liveliest correspondence was still with John Murray, Kinnaird, Hobhouse, and Moore. Of special interest are his frank letters, half flirtatious, to Lady Hardy, those to Trelawny and Mary Shelley, and a growing number to Leigh Hunt and his brother John (publisher of The Liberal and of Byron’s poems after his break with Murray), discussing inter alia his thoughts about the continuation of Don Juan.

There is irony in Byron’s advice for a reconciliation between Webster and his wife Frances, whose matrimonial virtue Byron was proud to have spared in England. And there is pathos in his letters to his half-sister urging her and her children to join him in Italy, unaware that his missives to Augusta and her replies were scrutinized by Lady Byron. From April on, the letters are full of concern for support of the Greek forces and preparations for his departure.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1979

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The ninth volume in Leslie Marchand’s highly acclaimed, unexpurgated edition of Byron’s letters finds the poet in Pisa with Teresa Guiccioli. His unique journal, “Detached Thoughts,” is finished shortly after his arrival in November 1821, and he is drawn into Shelley’s circle (including Edward Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and later Trelawny). His letters to Mary Shelley, the Hunts, and Trelawny after the death of Shelley are especially moving. Another tragedy, the death of his daughter Allegra, leaves him deeply affected, and he refers to it time and time again.

Money problems continue to plague him, as do suspicions surrounding his political activities. Following a fracas with a half-drunken dragoon and the imprisonment of two of his servants because of it, Byron is forced to leave Pisa and install himself and Teresa in a villa near Leghorn. His correspondence with his publisher reveals increasing displeasure with Murray’s delays, indecision, and anxiety over Don Juan, and Byron finally breaks off the relationship. But his output of verse is in no way lessened, and by the end of this volume in 1822, he has finished six more cantos for Don Juan as well as other poems.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1978

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

Born for Opposition opens with Byron in Ravenna, in 1821. His passion for the Countess Guiccioli is subsiding into playful fondness, and he confesses to his sister Augusta that he is not “so furiously in love as at first.” Italy, meanwhile, is afire with the revolutionary activities of the Carbonari, which Byron sees as “the very poetry of politics.” His journal, written while the insurrection grew, is a remarkable record of his reading and reflections while awaiting the sounds of gunfire. In spite of the turmoil, Byron stuck fast to his work. By the end of this volume, in October 1821, he is established in Pisa, having written Sardanapalus, Cain, and The Vision of Judgement.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1977
Byron’s letters provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. Readers and reviewers have responded with great enthusiasm to Leslie Marchand's new unexpurgated edition.
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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1976

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

In the fifth installment of this marvelous serial story, we read about Byron’s separation from his wife. Besides his pleading letters to Annabella asking her to reconsider, there are level-headed letters to Murray and Hobhouse and Hunt and Rogers—all written during the tempestuous time before his final departure from England. The accounts written during the ensuing summer, of Waterloo and the Rhine and Switzerland, reveal new depths of Byron’s maturing mind. But the very best letters here are the ones from Italy: freed from the inhibitions of English society, Byron’s spirit seems to expand and his letters reflect the joie de vivre that, despite his melancholy, was an inherent part of his character.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1975

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

In this volume, Byron corresponds with writers such as Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and “Monk” Lewis; with John Murray about the publication of The Corsair, Lara, and The Hebrew Melodies; and with many personal friends. A new interest is his association with the Drury Lane Theater. The crucial events of his private life at this time are his engagement to Anabella Milbanke and their marriage early in 1815—a marriage that was to last little more than a year. Especially revelatory are his letters to his fiancée and those to his long-time confidante, Lady Melbourne.

Volume IV includes all the letters from the beginning of 1814 to the end of 1815.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1974

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The third volume starts with Byron at the first crest of his fame following the publication of Childe Harold. It includes his literary letters to Tom Moore, frank and intimate ones to Hobhouse, pungent ones to Hanson and Murray, and his lively and amusing missives to Lady Melbourne, his confidante through all his love affairs. To her he describes the backwash of his tempestuous affair with Caroline Lamb, his emotional crises with Lady Oxford, the beginning of his liaison with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his flirtation with Lady Frances Webster. The volume contains the letters of 1813 and the journal of 1813–1814, the first of his five incomparable journals.

The letters display, as Martin Fagg puts it, a “bewitching amalgam of the picturesque and the earthy, of arrogance and modesty, of vituperation and tenderness, of soulfulness and sheer irresistible high spirits.” They confirm Max Beerbohm’s opinion, “Byron’s letters are, I think, the best ever written—the fullest and most spontaneous.”

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1973

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The first volume of Byron’s letters and journals covers his early years and includes his first pilgrimage to Greece and to the East, ending with his last letter from Constantinople on July 4, 1810, before his departure for Athens. Here is the direct record of his rapid development from the serious schoolboy to the facetious youth with ambivalent reactions to his perplexed mother, and the maturing man of extraordinary perceptions and sympathies and friendships. By the end of this volume he has already written English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (in part a spirited reaction to the reception of his earliest published work) and the first two Cantos of Childe Harold (published in 1812), which was to make him famous.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1973

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The second volume of Byron’s letters embraces his second year in Greece, his revealing accounts to Hobhouse and others of his life in Athens, his visit to Veli Pasha, and his return by Malta to England. It covers the period of the loss of his mother and of several of his closest friends, of his first acquaintance with Moore and Rogers, his maiden speech in the House of Lords, the publication of Childe Harold, and the resulting fame that brought him into Whig society. It marks the beginning of his correspondence with Lady Melbourne, who became the confidante of his liaisons with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and who forwarded his first (rejected) proposal to Annabella Milbanke.

Leslie A. Marchand, the author of critical studies and of the definitive biography of Byron, has brought a lifetime of study to the major task of editing these letters. He has done it with a restraint and objectivity that allows Byron to come through to us with unimpeded clarity.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

Byron’s epistolary saga continues con brio in this volume. At the start of 1818 he sends off the last canto of Childe Harold and abandons himself to the debaucheries of the Carnival in Venice. At the close of 1819 he resolves to return to England but instead follows Teresa Guiccioli to Ravenna. In the meantime he writes three long poems and two cantos of Don Juan, whose bowdlerization he violently protests; he breaks off with Marianna Segati, copes with his amorous “tigress” Margarita Cogni, then falls passionately in love with the young Countess Guiccioli; he thinks seriously of emigrating to South America; he takes custody of his little daughter Allegra and becomes increasingly fond of the child. The Shelleys visit him, as does Thomas Moore, to whom he entrusts his memoirs (burned after his death). The letters to friends are a marvelous outpouring of funny anecdotes, practical talk, discussions of his poems, statements of his beliefs. The love letters are in a class by themselves.

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Catalogue of Books and Journals, 1891-1965
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press, 1967

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An Intimate Chronicle
The Journals of William Clayton
George D. Smith
Signature Books, 1995
William Clayton is best remembered today for his hymns, especially “Come, Come Ye Saints.” But as one of the earliest Latter-day Saint scribes, he made intellectual as well as artistic contributions to his church, and his records have been silently incorporated into official Mormon scripture and history. Of equal significance are his personal impressions of day-to-day activities, which describe a social and religious world largely unfamiliar to modern readers.

In ministering to the sick, for instance, Clayton anointed with perfumed oil and rum. He performed baptisms to heal the sick. Church services, held irregularly, were referred to as “going to meeting” and seemed to be elective. He testifies of people speaking in tongues and of others “almost speaking in tongues.” When introduced to plural marriage, he was reluctant but eventually became one of its most enthusiastic proponents, marrying ten women and fathering forty-two children.

Since polygamy was initially secret, Clayton spent much of his time putting out the fires of innuendo and discontent. He caught his first plural wife rendezvousing with her former fiancé; later, when she became pregnant, her mother–his unaware mother-in-law–was so overwrought that she attempted suicide. Joseph Smith reassured him: “Just keep her at home and brook it and if they raise trouble about it and bring you before me I will give you an awful scourging and probably cut you off from the church and then I will set you ahead as good as ever.” Clayton was also the object of Emma Smith’s attentions, allegedly part of a jealous wife’s plan to make a cuckold of her errant husband.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 1960

In July 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle: “My whole philosophy…teaches acquiescence and optimism.” The journals in this volume, beginning in the summer of 1841, record the spiritual history of two years that can be viewed as the most critical test in Emerson’s life of his ability to maintain the two aspects of that philosophy.

Early in 1842 his son Waldo died, and the man who only months before had described himself as “professor of the joyous Science” found himself once again confronting the full implications of grief. Seeking to comprehend the loss, he used his journals to articulate and rediscover the vital faith upon which his philosophy rested. In passages that went eventually into “Experience,” and in the earliest drafts of the poem “Threnody,” which appear for the first time in these pages, he discovered that even this harsh event had its “compensations.” Waldo’s death forced a reassessment of the convictions that gave life to his earlier writings. He transformed his numb responses into his most moving poetry and prose, giving new and significant meaning to his “old motto”: “I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory I am born.”

Emerson’s motto is revealing, for its concepts display aptly the bipolarity that characterizes so much of his thought during these crucial years. He carried on at length an internal debate between the active and passive life styles. He saw his friends committed in their various ways to a more emphatic practice of their philosophies than he was able to undertake. Moving between engagement and withdrawal, commitment and aloofness, action and passivity, he consistently sought that point of equilibrium where the opposing forces of his thought could be held in creative tension.

As Emerson’s private experience deepened, he was becoming more completely the public man of letters: writing, publishing, editing The Dial, and lecturing. His travels brought him in contact with the leading men of his day, and with sights and exposures which even his beloved New England could not offer. Amidst the public duties, however, it was Concord which remained the still, vital center of his life. A brilliant and widely diversified range of visitors brought the world to Emerson’s home and inspired him to explore personal and literary issues which he would develop in his journals and later utilize in lectures and essays.

Emerson saw his calling as that of a poet; these journals are abundant in verse. Working versions of some of his most noted poems reveal the complex relationship between his private and literary life and the manner in which he attempted to fuse the diversities of his thought. In the eight regular journals and three miscellaneous notebooks of this volume is the record of these fusions. This period of his life closes, as it opened, with “acquiescence and optimism.” But the creative skepticism which is so characteristic of the second series of essays and the poems of 1841–1843 is the mark of a “very real philosophy,” tempered and tried by adversity, by success, and by “Experience.”

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

The final volume of the Harvard edition presents the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s last years. In them, he reacts to the changing America of the post–Civil War years, commenting on Reconstruction, immigration, protectionism in trade, and the dangers of huge fortunes in few hands—as well as on baseball and the possibilities of air travel. His role as a Harvard Overseer evokes his thoughts on education during crucial years of reform in American universities.

His travels take him to Europe for the third time, and for the first time he encounters the new garden of California and the enigma of Egypt. He continues to lecture, and a second volume of poems and two more collections of essays, culled from his manuscripts, are published. Finally, his late journals show Emerson confronting his loss of creative vigor, husbanding his powers, and maintaining his equanimity in the face of decline.

This concluding volume thus gives a complex picture of Emerson in his last sixteen years, facing old age but still the advocate of “newness” throughout the world.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

The Civil War is a pervasive presence in the journals in this volume. “The war searches character,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Both his reading and his writing reflected his concern for the endurance of the nation, whose strength lay in the moral strength of the people. He read military biographies and memoirs, while turning again to Persian, Chinese, and Indian literature. The deaths of Clough, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson prompted him to reread their letters and journals, remembering and reappraising.

These were stirring, poignant years for Emerson. The times were hard, his lecturing was curtailed, and a new book seemed out of the question. He felt the losses, fears, and frustrations that come to those who believe in a cause they are too old to fight for. But his respected position as a man of letters brought him some unusual experiences, such as a trip to Washington in which he met President Lincoln, Secretaries Seward and Chase, and other key figures in the government. Inspecting West Point as a member of the Board of Visitors, he was deeply impressed by the character and spartan training of the cadets who were soon to see action.

At the war’s end, busy again with a heavy lecture schedule and feeling his age a little, he took a long look back at the conflict and concluded that war “heals a deeper wound than any it makes.”

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

The journals from 1854 to 1861 show the ripeness of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought overshadowed by the gravest problem of his time—slavery. In addition to completing English Traits (1856) and Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson wrote many of the lectures and articles that made up his next book, Society and Solitude. He also contributed often to The Atlantic Monthly after helping to found that magazine in 1857. Throughout these years he extended his strenuous trips as a lyceum lecturer, crossing and recrossing the frozen Mississippi several times each winter. In Concord, he continued his omnivorous reading, his beloved walks, and his friendships with Alcott, Channing, and Thoreau, but at home or away he saw America’s future darkening daily. In 1856, Emerson wrote to his brother William, “But what times are these, & how they make our studies impertinent, & even ourselves the same! I am looking into the map to see where I shall go with my children when Boston & Massachusetts surrender to the slave-trade.”

Influenced by events such as the murder of New England men in bloody Kansas and the assault on Charles Sumner in the U.S. Congress in 1856, by a growing friendship with Theodore Parker, and by John Brown’s visits to Concord in 1857 and 1859, Emerson became one of the most notable speakers against slavery. He armed himself for his emergence from the study by marshalling his thoughts on liberty as he would have ranged his thoughts on any other topic. Notebook WO Liberty, rediscovered in the Library of Congress in 1964, collects his ideas on slavery and human liberty. Probably begun in 1854 it contains drafts or records of seven antislavery speeches, including his major antislavery address, “American Slavery,” first given in January, 1855. These notebooks and journals bring the philosopher of "the infinitude of the private man" to January 1861 and the brink of war.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

The journals printed in this volume, covering the years 1852 to 1855, find Emerson increasingly drawn to the issues and realities of the pragmatic, hard-working nineteenth century. His own situation as a middle-aged, property-owning New Englander with a large household to support gave him a strong sense of everyday financial necessity, and his wide reading for his projected book on the English impressed him deeply with the worldly success that had come to that unphilosophical people. The growing crisis over slavery at home, moreover, demanded the attention of every citizen, even one as reluctant to engage in social issues as Emerson.

Emerson's extensive reading about the English, which ranged from Camden's Britannia through the diaries of Samuel Pepys and Thomas Moore to the latest issues of the London Times, convinced him that, despite its materialism, England was "the best of actual nations." The robust physical health of the English, their common sense, and their instinct for fair play insured that the future belonged to them and their transatlantic cousins, the Americans.

Yet the facts of American political life often led Emerson to wonder whether his country had any future at all. So long as his fellow citizens were willing to countenance the evil of slavery, they could not play their proper role in the world, the pages of his journals indicate, Emerson, like an increasing number of other Americans, was coming to believe that the issue had to he resolved, whatever the cost.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

In faithfully reproducing all of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s handwritten journals and notebooks, this edition is succeeding in revealing Emerson the man and the thinker. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omission of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his views of woman, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas. Canceled passages are reproduced, misreadings are corrected, and hitherto unpublished manuscripts are now printed.

Here is the twelfth volume, which makes available nine of Emerson’s lecture notebooks, covering a span of twenty-seven years, from 1835 to 1862, from apprenticeship to fame. These notebooks contain materials Emerson collected for the composition of his lectures, articles, and essays during those years, a complex mixture of index-like surveys of his journals, lists of possible topics and titles, salvaged journal passages and revisions, new drafts ranging from brief paragraphs to several pages in length, notes and translations from his reading, working notes, and partial outlines. In them we see Emerson at work, balancing his aspirations as orator and writer against the practicalities of deadlines, finances, and audiences.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Like Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to be the cultural historian and interpreter of his age—its business, politics, discoveries. The journals and notebooks included in this volume and covering in depth the years 1848 to 1851 reflect Emerson’s preoccupations with the events of these often turbulent years in America.

On his return to Concord from his successful lecture trip to England and visit to Paris in 1847–1848, Emerson resumed his familiar life of writer, thinker, and lecturer. Impressions of his recent European travels appear in passages in this volume which are used later in English Traits (1856). He writes of technological and scientific discoveries in America and abroad—one of which, the discovery of ether, was to involve his brother-in-law in legal embroilment. He ponders the meaning, for “the age” or “the times,” of reports on the Dew textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, of faster steamers daily breaking records, of new geological and paleontological findings, of theories of race, and many other matters that were coming increasingly to the fore in the mid-nineteenth century. Many passages on these topics, used first in lectures, later appear in his essays “Fate,” “Wealth,” and “Power” in Conduct of Life (1860). He was also adding to his critical biographies for Representative Men (1850), with special attention to Swedenborg, always a source of particular interest for Emerson.

Between 1850 and 1853, Emerson traveled farther west to lecture than he had hitherto ventured—to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and many other cities in the midwest. One notebook in the present volume records his customary percipient observations of places and people encountered during these western trips.

The tragic drowning of Margaret Fuller Ossoli and her family on her return from Italy in 1850 prompted Emerson to consider a collaboration on her life and writings, and another notebook printed here contains her memorabilia, including original entries by Emerson. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli by Emerson, William Henry Charming, and James Freeman Clarke, was published in 1852.

Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 brought to a boil something in Emerson that had long been simmering. Concerned with slavery, freedom, and the future of the black population in America more than his public record had shown, he now delivered himself of an outburst—pained, vitriolic, ironic—a more sustained response to a single issue than appears elsewhere in all his journals. In this latest move in a compounding national tragedy he could see only chicanery and deterioration, the crumbling of America’s moral fiber. He saw the Fugitive Slave Law in a larger context of a sick age; like Tennyson and Arnold in England, he lamented in moods of spite and chagrin the loss of faith and of an old world where political men of honor stood firm for the moral law. Most of his journal outburst went into his addresses “The Fugitive Slave Law,” 1851 and 1854.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Emerson's journals of 1847-1848 deal primarily with his second visit to Europe, occasioned by a British lecture tour that began at Manchester and Liverpool in November of 1847, took him to Scotland in the following February, and concluded in London during June after he had spent a month as a sightseer in Paris. The journals of these years, along with associated notebooks and letters, recorded the materials for lectures that Emerson composed while abroad, for additional lectures on England and the English that he wrote shortly after his return to Concord, and ultimately, for English Traits, the book growing out of his travels that he was to publish in 1856.

Travel abroad provided a needed change for Emerson in 1847 as it had done on previous occasions, though with his usual discounting of the values of mere change of place he was slow in deciding to make the trip. Discouragement with the prevailing political climate at the time of the Mexican War and the old uncertainty about his own proper role in the "Lilliput" of American society were much on his mind as the year began. In March he thought of withdrawing temporarily "from all domestic & accustomed relations"--preferably to enjoy "an absolute leisure with books," though he also recognized the want of some "stated task" to stimulate his flagging vitality; in July he finally agreed to accept a long-standing invitation to visit England as a lecturer. As matters turned out, a full schedule of lectures and travel, unexpectedly heavy social engagements along the way, and proliferating correspondence left Emerson little time for reading but did not prevent him from filling his journals with sharp observations on the passing scene.

As Emerson moved about England his acknowledged admiration for the English rose every day, though he was careful to distinguish their less admirable qualities.

The Englishman's "stuff or substance seems to be the best of the world," he told Margaret Fuller. "I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration." He took a wry amusement from the new experience of being lionized by his hosts. In his journals are lively portraits of those who entertained him, such as Richard Monckton Milnes, his particular sponsor in the society of London and Paris, and sketches of literary notables including Rogers, Dc Quincey, Wilson, Tennyson, and Dickens. He renewed acquaintance with Wordsworth and recorded in detail the pronouncements of his old friend Carlyle. Settling in London in March and April of 1848, he divided his time between work at his desk, visits to nearby points of interest, and the mixed pleasures of a busy social life. In May he went to France just as an abortive uprising against the new provisional government was brewing. Four weeks in Paris served to correct his old "prejudice" against the French, who on closer acquaintance rose in his estimation just as the English had done. In June he returned to London to lecture, and in July, after visiting Stonehenge with Carlyle, he sailed home. As the journals reveal, he reached Concord refreshed and renewed by the change of scene, the new acquaintance, and the generous reception that the trip had brought him, and with an enlarged perspective that revealed to him once again the "proper glory" of his own country.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

The pages of these five journals covering the years 1843 to 1847 are filled with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle to formulate the true attitude of the scholar to the vexing question of public involvement. Pulled between his belief that a disinterested independence was a requisite for the writer and the public demands heaped upon him as a leading intellectual figure, he notes to himself that he “pounds…tediously” on the “exemption of the writer from all secular works.”

Although Emerson concluded his editorship of The Dial in 1844, he was continually beset by calls for public service, most of which drew their impetus from the reformist syndrome of the 1840s. In response to such issues as the Temperance Movement, the utopian communities, and Henry Thoreau’s experiment in self-reliance at Walden Pond, Emerson exercised sympathetic skepticism and held a growing conviction that the society of the day was not the lost cause many of his contemporaries believed it to be.

These journals record Emerson’s optimistic attitudes and show how later they existed side-by-side with concerns that, under the impulse of abolition, Texas, and the Mexican War, led him to some bitter conclusions about the state of the nation. Thoreau’s refusal to pay his poll tax in demonstration against slavery and the war particularly horrified him, and he confides in his journal that Thoreau’s action diverted attention from the possibility of real reform.

The moral ambivalence and cynicism of the day strengthened Emerson’s belief that the self-reliant individual was the only answer. These individuals—men like Garrison, Phillips, and Carlyle—were, in Emerson’s estimation, destined to set the standards by which society would be judged. Encouraged by the prospective publication of his first volume of poetry in 1846, Emerson also spent much of this period composing verse. Among the poems in these journals are “Uriel,” “Merlin,” “Ode to Beauty,” and a section from “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love.”

In anticipation of his second visit to Europe, Emerson began preparing a lecture series on “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.” In these lectures he would take to the Old World his observations on the complexities of the times.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

When Ralph Waldo Emerson began these journals in June of 1838, he “had achieved initial success in each of his main forms of public utterance. The days of finding his proper role and public voice were now behind him…and his…personal life had healed from earlier wounds.” Now he was married to Lydia Jackson of Plymouth and was the father of a young son, Waldo. They lived in a large, comfortable house in Concord, only a half-day’s drive from Boston but close to the solitude of nature. Still to come was the controversy he would create by his address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, an address in which he would say that the Divinity School trained ministers for a dead church. These journals record his responses to the severe criticism and trace his struggles as he overcame the stings of attack with a growing confidence in himself as a thinker, lecturer, and writer.

In addition to introspective writings, the journals contain Emerson’s observations on his reading, on his country, especially during the presidential campaign of 1840, on slavery, on art and nature, on religion and the need for a new understanding of its meaning, and on love. His relations with such close friends as Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller also are reflected here, as are his developing friendships with Thoreau, Jones Very, Samuel Ward, Caroline Sturgis, and William Ellery Channing, the poet.

During this period he gave three series of lectures and published his second book, Essays, which contains some of his greatest work: “Self Reliance,” “Compensation,” and “The Over-Soul.” The major workshop for Essays, these journals are indispensable for the study of Emerson’s creative processes. Many entries are published here for the first time, including experimental lists of topics for Essays and possibly the earliest draft of the poem “The Sphinx.”

For Emerson, the journal was one of the most important of literary genres. His own journals not only formed his “artificial memory,” but became “a living part of him.” He later wrote, “The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Volume VI in this series contains quotation books and miscellaneous notebooks that Ralph Waldo Emerson kept between 1824 and 1838, and to which he added occasionally as late as the 1860s. With some attempt at a systematic listing, but more often at random, he set down an enormous variety of entries from Burke, Montaigne, Madame de Staël, Bacon, Plutarch, Jeremy Taylor, and a host of other writers both famous and obscure, with frequent comments of his own.

One book contains Emerson’s lengthy translations of Goethe, while another is devoted to his brother Charles, who died in 1836, and includes, among other items, excerpts from Charles’s letters to his fiancée. A third contains an interview with a survivor of the battle of Concord and household accounts from the fall and winter of 1835, just after Emerson’s marriage to Lydia Jackson.

Frequent annotations show that Emerson referred to several of these books in composing the sermons he began to give late in 1826, and that many of the entries found their way into his public lectures, into Nature, and into Essays: First Series. These pages are a fascinating indication of the sources on which Emerson drew steadily in his writing and thinking, and reflect clearly, although indirectly, his own characteristic philosophy.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

The journals of 1835–1838, perhaps the richest Ralph Waldo Emerson had yet written, cover the pivotal years when he brought to Concord his second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, published Nature (1836), and wrote “The American Scholar” (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838). As he turned from the pulpit to the lecture platform in the 1830’s, the journals became more and more repository for the substance of future lectures; his annual winter series, particularly those dealing with The Philosophy of History, in 1836–1837, and Human Culture, in 1837–1838, were drawn largely from materials contained in this volume.

Along with lecture material, the journals of these years include Emerson’s notes on his extensive reading, expressions of his griefs and joys, and his perennial reflections on man and his relation to nature and the divine. The birth of his son Waldo in October of 1836 compensated perhaps for the death of his beloved brother Charles the previous May. New friendships with Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, and especially Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson called “the highest genius of the time”) replaced to a degree the close intellectual companionship he had enjoyed with Charles.

Printed here for the first time are the complete texts of these journals. They reveal the continuity of Emerson’s development and add to the understanding both of his thought and of his methods of literary composition.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s decision to quit the ministry, arrived at painfully during the summer and fall of 1832, was accompanied by illness so severe that he was forced to give up any immediate thought of a new career. Instead, in December, he embarked on a tour of Europe that was to take him to Italy, France, Scotland, and England. Within a year after his return in the fall in 1833, his health largely restored, he went to live in the town of Concord, his home from then on.

The record of Emerson’s ten months in Europe which makes up a large part of this book is unusually detailed and personal, actually a diary recording what Emerson saw and did as well as what he thought. He describes cities, scenes, and buildings that he found striking in one way or another and he gives impressions of the people he met. During his travels he made the acquaintance of Landor, of Lafayette, and of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, all of whom stimulated him. In Paris he was so much stirred by a visit to the Jardin des Plantes that he determined “to become a naturalist.”

On his return to America, still without a profession, he reverted in his journals to the more impersonal form they had taken in his days as a minister, focusing on his inner experiences rather than on external events. Notes start dotting the pages once again, this time not so much for future sermons—although for years he did a certain amount of occasional preaching as for the addresses of the public lecturer he would soon become.

Through the thirty-four months covered by this volume, the journals continue to he the advancing record of Emerson’s mind, demonstrating a growing maturity and firmness of style by compression and aphorism.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life from 1826 to 1832 has a classic dramatic structure, beginning with his approbation to preach in October 1826, continuing with his courtship, his brief marriage to Ellen Tucker, and his misery after her death, and concluding with his departure from the ministry.

The journals and notebooks of these years are far fewer than those in the preceding six years. Emerson noted down many ideas for sermons in his journals, but as time went on he wrote the sermons independently. Occasionally he wrote openly about family matters, but except for the passionate response to Ellen and her death the journals tell little about the impact upon him of other people and outside events. The pattern is consistent with the earlier journals: Emerson used them mainly to record his thought, to develop and express his ideas. His religious and intellectual interests were undergoing significant changes in orientation or emphasis. He was less concerned with the existence of God than with the nature and influence of Christ. He continued to reassert the truth of Christianity, but in his growing unorthodoxy he came to show less and less sympathy with the church, with forms and ritual, with convention. And he began to wonder whether it is not the worst part of the man that is the minister.

During these years, Emerson read more in Madame de Staël, Wordsworth, Gérando, and Coleridge, less in Milton, the Augustans, Dugald Stewart, and Scott. In style, he moved from a rambling, bookish rhetoric to the tautness and the cadences that mark his later Essays.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas.

The second volume prints the exact texts of nine journals and three notebooks. It reveals the shape of some of Emerson’s enduring interests, in embryo “essays” on the moral sense, moral beauty, taste, greatness and fame, friendship, compensation, and the unity of God and the universe. Restored from oblivion are suppressed passages on the Negro and revelations of acute melancholy and rebelliousness. These records of his developing thought are also the history of his early obscurity, when the fame he sought was still painfully remote.

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Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas. Cancelled passages are reproduced, misreadings are corrected, and hitherto unpublished manuscripts are now printed. The text comes as close to a literal transcription as is feasible. A full apparatus of annotation, identification of quotations, and textual notes is supplied. Reproduced in this volume are twelve facsimile manuscript pages, many with Emerson’s marginal drawings.

The first volume includes some of the “Wide Worlds,” journals begun while Emerson was at Harvard, and four contemporary notebooks, mostly unpublished. In these storehouses of quotation, juvenile verse, themes, and stories are the first versions of Emerson’s “Valedictory Poem,” Bowdoin Prize Essays, and first published work. Together they give a faithful picture of Emerson’s apprenticeship as an artist and reveal the extent of his hidden and frustrated ambition—to become a writer.

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The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles W. Chesnutt
Duke University Press, 1993
Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man's dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century.
Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt's everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt's journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.
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The Journals of Claire Clairmont
Claire Clairmont
Harvard University Press

The diaries of Clara Mary Jane Clairmont are, so far as is known, the last of the major documents of the Shelley-Byron circle to be published. Only the writings of the Shelleys themselves surpass hers in importance for those interested in the careers of the poets and their friends. Best known as Byron's mistress and the mother of his daughter Allegra, "Claire," as she preferred to be called, is important to literary history for her role in bringing Byron and Shelley together.

Claire Clairmont began her journals in 1814, when she accompanied Shelley and her half-sister, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, on their elopement to the continent. She continued to write them until after Byron and Shelley were dead and she was living as a governess with a wealthy family in Moscow. The journals present a detailed and fascinating picture of life with the Shelley family their discovery of the European landscape, wretched days in London dodging bailiffs and bill collectors, happy days of opera and ballet and endless conversations. Our knowledge of the Shelleys' life in Italy is expanded by this intimate view of the brilliant society of artists, writers, musicians, actors, scholars, revolutionaries, and nobility who were their constant companions. The later entries provide an account of the daily life of an Englishwoman living in Russia during the exciting time of the Decembrist uprising.

In The Journals of Claire Clairemont, Stocking has brought together five of Claire's journals, all that is known of the now-lost Russian journal, and two leaflets of Miscellanea dealing with the years 1828 to 1830. The interruptions in the diaries are bridged by narratives that allow the reader to follow her life, as she develops from an effervescent schoolgirl into a self-possessed, attractive, and talented young woman.

Appendices present reviews of theatrical performances seen by Claire and the Shelleys, biographical sketches of the varied personages they knew in Italy, a review by Mary Shelley (1826) describing people and life on the Continent as Claire and the Shelleys saw it, and the text of a manuscript fragment, possibly by Claire, containing thinly disguised romantic portrayals of the Shelleys and Jane and Edward Ellerker Williams. There is also a list of Claire's voluminous and systematic reading. Editorial comment within the body of the text has been kept to a minimum, and all of Claire's rewritings and crossings out are clearly indicated. Genealogical tables and numerous footnotes help to place Claire's journals in their proper social and historical perspective.

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The Journals of Jeffery Amherst, 1757-1763, Volume 1
The Daily and Personal Journals
Robert J. Andrews
Michigan State University Press, 2014
General Jeffery Amherst served as commander in chief of the British army in North America during the Seven Years’ War from 1758 until 1763. Under Amherst’s leadership the British defeated French forces enabling the British Crown to claim Canada. Like many military officers, Amherst kept a journal of his daily activities, and the scope of this publication is from March 1757, while he was Commissary to the troops of Hesse-Kassel on British service in Germany, until his return to Great Britain in December 1763. The daily journal contains a record of and a commentary on events that Amherst witnessed or that he learned of through his correspondence. Where he mentions letters or orders received or sent, where possible, the present-day source locations of documents are identified. The Daily and Personal Journals are the record of the man who played a decisive role in British victories at Louisbourg, on Lake Champlain, and at Montreal. Amherst wrote the personal journal after he returned home. It does not have entries made on a daily basis. It is replete with lists, diagrams, and compendia to more fully explain events. Colored diagrams show dispositions or “Orders of Battle,” organizational structures, and evidence of uniform colors of units for campaigns at Louisbourg, Quebec, Niagara, Lake Champlain, the Carolinas, Montreal, and the Caribbean. In addition, Amherst made mileage charts and lists of ships, currency values, and officers who died during the war.
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The Journals of Jeffery Amherst, 1757-1763, Volume 2
A Dictionary of People, Places, and Ships
Robert J. Andrews
Michigan State University Press, 2014
A Dictionary of People, Places, and Ships has more than 1,400 biographies of people mentioned by General Jeffery Amherst in his journals or identified by Robert J. Andrews in his notes. Included are entries for military and naval personnel, aboriginal leaders and warriors, and civilians. Where possible, a commission history is included for each officer of the French Forces, the Royal Navy, provincial officers, and regulars of the British Army. There is an extensive section about various types of commissions, ranks, units, regiments, and appointments. National origins of British army officers are discussed along with roles played by women of the army. Andrews identifies and analyzes units of “The American Army” that fought Great Britain’s war against the French during the Seven Years’ War in North America. Entries for sites that are named in Amherst’s journals contain descriptions or brief histories for each place. It also describes ships that are mentioned in the journals, including vessels that took part in the Louisbourg operation in 1758, Men of War employed at New York, and British and French vessels on the Great Lakes.
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The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878
Josiah Gorgas, edited by Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, foreword by Frank E. Vandiver
University of Alabama Press, 2009

Josiah Gorgas was best known as the highly regarded Chief of Confederate Ordnance. Born in 1818, he attended West Point, served in the U.S. Army, and later, after marrying Amelia Gayle, daughter of a former Alabama governor, joined the Confederacy. After the Civil War he served as president of The University of Alabama until ill health forced him to resign. His journals, maintained between 1857 and 1878, reflect the family's economic successes and failures, detail the course of the South through the Civil War, and describe the ordeal of Reconstruction. Few journals cover such a sweep of history. An added dimension is the view of Victorian family life as Gorgas explored his feelings about aspects of parental responsibility and transmission of values to children--a rarely documented account from the male perspective. His son, called Willie in the journals, was William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920), who was noted for his fight to control yellow fever and who became surgeon general of the United States.

In his foreword to the volume, Frank E. Vandiver states: "Wiggins has done much more than present a well-edited version of Gorgas's diaries and journals; she has interpreted them in full Gorgas family context and in perspective of the times they cover. . . . Wiggins informs with the sort of editorial notes expected of a careful scholar, but she enlightens with wide knowledge of American and southern history. . . . Josiah Gorgas [was] an unusually observant, passionate man, a 'galvanized Rebel' who deserves rank among the true geniuses of American logistics."

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Journals of Thomas H. Hobbs
Thomas Hubbard Hobbs
University of Alabama Press, 1976
A valuable account of life in the South

Written between 1840, when the diarist was fourteen years old, and 1862, when he died serving the Confederate States of America.


 
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The Journals
Volume 1: 1949-1965
John Fowles
Northwestern University Press, 2008
John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century.
The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life.
The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England's Dorset coast, where discontented with society's voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life.
Great works in their own right, Fowles' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.
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The Journals
Volume 2: 1966-1990
John Fowles
Northwestern University Press, 2009
John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century.
The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life.
The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England's Dorset coast, where discontented with society's voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life.
Great works in their own right, Fowles' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.
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Journals
Volume Fifteen
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1989
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.

The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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The Letters and Journals
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Northwestern University Press, 1998
One of the great modern painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker was also a gifted writer who left behind journals and a sizable correspondence. This edition includes every extant letter, all carefully annotated, and is illustrated with forty-six black-and-white plates.
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Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press

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Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press

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Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press

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Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press

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Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press
James Fenimore Cooper's magnificent vision of American civilization was probably doomed from the outset. Yet the dream died hard, as the years (1845-1851) recorded in volumes V and VI of his Letters and Journals show. Vigorous and perceptive as ever at 55, he continued to combat forces in the national life that he feared were destroying its civility and constitutional structures. When, finally, he realized that his efforts were barren, he found some solace in religion. Cooper mellowed perceptibly in his later years, and his genius for friendship is perhaps better revealed here than in earlier volumes. And his range of observation remained kaleidoscopic: the Mexican War, the Navy, the French Revolution of 1848, the theatre, and the latest New York scandal. Nor did his productivity slacken. Between 1845 and 1850, he averaged two books a year, undertook a revised edition of his works in fine format, composed a play, and, at the time of his death, had in press The Towns of Manhattan, which was to have been the first history of Greater New York City.
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Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press
James Fenimore Cooper's magnificent vision of American civilization was probably doomed from the outset. Yet the dream died hard, as the years (1845-1851) recorded in volumes V and VI of his Letters and Journals show. Vigorous and perceptive as ever at 55, he continued to combat forces in the national life that he feared were destroying its civility and constitutional structures. When, finally, he realized that his efforts were barren, he found some solace in religion. Cooper mellowed perceptibly in his later years, and his genius for friendship is perhaps better revealed here than in earlier volumes. And his range of observation remained kaleidoscopic: the Mexican War, the Navy, the French Revolution of 1848, the theatre, and the latest New York scandal. Nor did his productivity slacken. Between 1845 and 1850, he averaged two books a year, undertook a revised edition of his works in fine format, composed a play, and, at the time of his death, had in press The Towns of Manhattan, which was to have been the first history of Greater New York City. Volume VI provides a cumulative index to the entire edition and contains an important section of additional letters (1825-1844) discovered since the earlier volumes were published.
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logo for Harvard University Press
Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press
James Fenimore Cooper's magnificent vision of American civilization was probably doomed from the outset. Yet the dream died hard, as the years (1845-1851) recorded in volumes V and VI of his Letters and Journals show. Vigorous and perceptive as ever at 55, he continued to combat forces in the national life that he feared were destroying its civility and constitutional structures. When, finally, he realized that his efforts were barren, he found some solace in religion. Cooper mellowed perceptibly in his later years, and his genius for friendship is perhaps better revealed here than in earlier volumes. And his range of observation remained kaleidoscopic: the Mexican War, the Navy, the French Revolution of 1848, the theatre, and the latest New York scandal. Nor did his productivity slacken. Between 1845 and 1850, he averaged two books a year, undertook a revised edition of his works in fine format, composed a play, and, at the time of his death, had in press The Towns of Manhattan, which was to have been the first history of Greater New York City. Volume VI provides a cumulative index to the entire edition and contains an important section of additional letters (1825-1844) discovered since the earlier volumes were published.
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logo for Harvard University Press
Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Lord Byron
Selected Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1982

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The Old Land and the New
The Journals of Two Swiss Families in America in the 1820s
Robert H. Billigmeier and Fred Altschuler Picard, EditorsTranslated by Robert H. Billigmeier and Fred Altschuler PicardIllustrations by Hans Erni
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

The Old Land and the New was first published in 1965. 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.

These are the journals in English translation of two early Swiss immigrants to America who provided an intriguing picture of life as they saw it in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The book is illustrated with sketches by the Swiss artist, Hans Erni.

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Once I Too Had Wings
The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918
Emma Bell Miles
Ohio University Press, 2014

Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She and her husband Frank lived on Walden’s Ridge in southeast Tennessee, where they struggled to raise a family in the difficult mountain environment. Between 1908 and 1918, Miles kept a series of journals in which she recorded in beautiful and haunting prose the natural wonders and local customs of Walden’s Ridge. Jobs were scarce, however, and as the family’s financial situation deteriorated, Miles began to sell literary works and paintings to make ends meet. Her short stories appeared in national magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and Lippincott’s, and in 1905 she published Spirit of the Mountains, a nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. After the death of her three-year-old son from scarlet fever in 1913, the journals took a more somber turn as Miles documented the difficulties of mountain life, the plight of women in rural communities, the effect of disparities of class and wealth, and her own struggle with tuberculosis.

Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals contain both poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman’s perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. With a foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, this edited selection of Emma Bell Miles’s journals is illustrated with examples of her painting.

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Useful to the Church and Kingdom
The Journals of James H. Martineau, Pioneer and Patriarch, 1850-1918, Volume: 1
Noel A. Carmack
Signature Books, 2023
After receiving a liberal arts education at the Munro Academy in Elbridge, New York, and a stint in the U.S.–Mexican War, James Henry Martineau spent his life as a surveyor, civil engineer, clerk, mapmaker, and pathfinder in Zion. After becoming a Latter-day Saint in 1850, Martineau went with Apostle George A. Smith to settle Parowan in southern Utah, with a commitment to building God’s kingdom in the West. As a leader in the Utah Territorial Militia he conducted military drills, witnessed events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the legal trials of its perpetrators, explored wilderness areas, submitted reports, and drew maps to record his travels throughout the entire Mormon corridor.

These journals document his exploration of virgin lands in southern Utah, his laying out of townsites and farmland in Cache Valley, his participation in canal building and water projects in Arizona, and his near-death experiences while surveying rough, mountainous areas. His work for the Union Pacific Railroad through Weber Canyon and across the Salt Lake Promontory and Humboldt Desert in 1868 is one of the very few complete records of its kind. 
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front cover of Useful to the Church and Kingdom
Useful to the Church and Kingdom
The Journals of James H. Martineau, Pioneer and Patriarch, 1850-1918, Volume: 2
Noel A. Carmack
Signature Books, 2023
After receiving a liberal arts education at the Munro Academy in Elbridge, New York, and a stint in the U.S.–Mexican War, James Henry Martineau spent his life as a surveyor, civil engineer, clerk, mapmaker, and pathfinder in Zion. After becoming a Latter-day Saint in 1850, Martineau went with Apostle George A. Smith to settle Parowan in southern Utah, with a commitment to building God’s kingdom in the West. As a leader in the Utah Territorial Militia he conducted military drills, witnessed events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the legal trials of its perpetrators, explored wilderness areas, submitted reports, and drew maps to record his travels throughout the entire Mormon corridor.

These journals document his exploration of virgin lands in southern Utah, his laying out of townsites and farmland in Cache Valley, his participation in canal building and water projects in Arizona, and his near-death experiences while surveying rough, mountainous areas. His work for the Union Pacific Railroad through Weber Canyon and across the Salt Lake Promontory and Humboldt Desert in 1868 is one of the very few complete records of its kind. 
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The View from the Dugout
The Journals of Red Rolfe
Edited by William M. Anderson
University of Michigan Press, 2006
"Somewhere, if they haven't been destroyed, there are hundreds of pages of typewritten notes about American League players of that era, notes which I would love to get my hands on."
-Bill James, in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, on the journals of Red Rolfe

"Red Rolfe's journal for his years as manager of the Detroit Tigers is the kind of precious source researchers yearn for. In combination with William M. Anderson's well-done text, The View from the Dugout will be of great interest to general readers and of immense value to students of baseball history."
-Charles C. Alexander, author of Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era

"Red Rolfe was one of baseball's most astute observers. This is 'inside' baseball from the inside."
-Donald Honig, author of Baseball America, Baseball When the Grass Was Real, and other books in the Donald Honig Best Players of All Time series

"In his lucid journals Red Rolfe has provided an inside look at how an intelligent baseball manager thinks and prepares."
-Ray Robinson, Yankee historian and author of Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time

Baseball players as a rule aren't known for documenting their experiences on the diamond. Red Rolfe, however, during his time as manager of the Detroit Tigers from 1949 to 1952, recorded daily accounts of each game, including candid observations about his team's performance. He used these observations to coach his players and to gain an advantage by recording strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies of opposing players and managers. Rolfe's journals carry added value considering his own career as an All-Star Yankee third baseman on numerous world champion teams, where he was a teammate of Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio.

Today, in the era of televised broadcasts, networks often wire a manager so that viewers can listen to his spontaneous comments throughout the game. Red Rolfe's journals offer an opportunity to find out what a manager is thinking when no one is around to hear.

William M. Anderson is Director of the Department of History, Arts and Libraries for the State of Michigan. His books include The Detroit Tigers: A Pictorial Celebration of the Greatest Players and Moments in Tigers' History.
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