...This chapter takes up the challenges and pleasures of reading the American Civil War diaries of southern slave-owning women. The rewards include discovering the immediate, first-draft, small-scale qualities of diaries, each in its own way bringing the past to us like no other text. The challenges...

...This chapter looks at some well-known, much-used American Civil War diaries written by slave-owning women, with a focus on what they said about the “whys” and “hows” of diary-keeping. No woman among them planned on becoming a war diarist, so discovering the fresh pleasures and frustrations of diary...

... diaries. Diarists transcribe what many of them say and do, sometimes with hostility or fear, but often thoughtfully and with surprise. Diaries thus reveal not the “end” of slavery, but rather slavery in the midst of ending. In writing about the uncertain future that the war presented to everyone, diarists...

...As southern women of the slave-owning class wrote in their diaries about the excitement and destruction of the Civil War—about war’s violence, men, slaves, and the odd act of diary-keeping itself—they also wrote about themselves. What sort of person am I? It was a question diarists rarely asked...

...Americans wrote fiercely during their civil war. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans’ words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have...

... much feeling, or too little. Did she selflessly accept that soldiers died for a deathless cause, that this was a Good Death, in some way? Or was the Confederacy unworthy of her great sacrifice? Analyzing the initial reactions of widows, which the widows recorded in diaries and letters, reveals...

... struggled with opposing national loyalties. Even enslaved men and women found themselves divided over how to respond to the war. The author studies letters, diaries, newspapers, and government documents to understand how families coped with the unprecedented intrusion of war into their private lives. Family...

... with antebellum medical journals, planters' diaries, agricultural publications, letters from wounded African American soldiers, WPA narratives, and military and Freedmen's Bureau reports, the author traces African Americans' political acts to secure medical care: their organizing mutual-aid societies...

...William Alexander Percy's own story of belonging, which he would revise throughout his life, emerges in his poetry, his diaries, his correspondence, and his memoir. It included a distinctly more diverse cast: sculptors, poets, travelers, gardeners, and drifters; men who married and men who did...

...Joe Richman and his Radio Diaries team make a lot of compelling, mostly un-narrated historical documentaries, but Joe first became known as the master of the “radio diary.” He gives people recorders and asks them to tape themselves as they go about their lives, talk with their friends...

...—the reversals, weird occurrences, and outright destruction of lives and the material world. War demanded that they write in their diaries, but war also made writing inadequate. War shook up everything normal, and so the diarist found herself writing how normal time turned into something else—wartime. Women...

...Evidence found in the diaries and other private modes of expression written by antebellum southern white men show that the writers practiced forms of masculine performance expected of their class. Nineteenth century diarists showed a need to express themselves emotionally. Diary entries capture...