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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 grow from discovering how a woman’s diary is forever a fragment even when it comes to us untouched from her hands. Most diaries come to us from other hands, those of protective family members and ambitious editors who over the years changed the diary text in one way or another to make it more “readable,” “relevant,” and, in the end, less diary-like. Playing with the tension between the woman’s unruly diary text and the neat “historical source” others have made of it is one of the satisfactions of exploring diaries. It is one of the conditions of knowing past worlds as far as we are able, and a way to find if there is room for empathy with lives mostly unlike our own.

Women such as Julia Stimson and Helen Dore Boylston were motivated by both a desire for travel and adventure and a wish to prove themselves as professional women. They met the challenge of wartime nursing service, and the sometimes-chauvinistic responses of medical men to their presence in the ‘zone of the armies’, with a combination of diplomacy and indifference.

This chapter looks at women diarists from the southern slave-owning class looking at civil war. Some wrote a great deal about the battles and politics, while others wrote only occasionally about the far-reaching conflict. But all of the diarists comment on the sheer, local craziness of war—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 found themselves writing about cannonades and enemy soldiers at the door, about strange mutations in everything “every-day,” in the routines of home, the choice of clothing and food, and in the novel presence of working-class white men in the shape of Confederate soldiers. Wartime challenged women’s inventiveness as diarists, and it shows how the diary as a text—open, changeable, tied to the moment—brings wartime close to readers today.

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 head-on, but it was something they wrote about in other ways. As the war transformed everything in their lives, diarists reflected on what had held their lives together, including faith in God and faith itself, femininity as a timeless quality with a “natural” force, and the strangeness of human emotions. Doing this, women also wrote about keeping a diary. They wrote about how a diary does not so much hold the past, but ghosts of the past. They wrote of words’ fleeting but irreplaceable power, and how a diary hands over a mind’s life, always and forever in first draft.

This chapter looks at how, at the outbreak of war, Mass-Observation looked to the new Ministry of Information for sponsorship, but, despite a brief commission in the autumn of 1939, it was not until April 1940 that a long-term contract was secured. In the meantime Mass-Observation came near to collapse. The London and Bolton staff, irregularly paid and autocratically managed, became rebellious, until Harrisson’s deal with his friend, Mary Adams, in charge of Home Intelligence, secured regular funding. This deal became the occasion, though not the cause, for Madge’s decision to abandon Mass-Observation. Despite the desperate scramble for funding, Harrisson was determined to preserve Mass-Observation’s independence and pursue his long-term goal of documenting the social history of the war, with fieldwork carried out by the staff and the responses and war diaries sent in by the volunteer panel.

The epilogue suggests the possibility for a revision of redemption in reading Quel giorno trent’anni fa (1975; That Day Thirty Years Ago), an unknown diary by Neapolitan aristocrat Maria Luisa D’Aquino. The diary makes a proleptic rejoinder to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44. Published in the same years and set in the Campana countryside, Quel giorno trent’anni fa is also a wartime conversion narrative that tracks the transformation of the narrator from her descent into hell as a newly widowed mother of five into a contemporary Dante. However, whereas Lewis constructs his diary with an eye to establishing his authority over the events, D’Aquino does so in order to inscribe herself within them, making herself a gendered, sexualized symbol for the Italian nation and the author of her own redemption.

Founded by the Methodist Church prior to the Civil War, Tuskegee Female College (now known as Huntington College) was one of the few Southern institutions of higher education to remain open during the war. In 1860, over 200 students enrolled. Following Abraham Lincoln’s election and the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as the president of the Confederate States of American just miles away from the college, the campus was within earshot of rockets and regional bombardment. Student life was enveloped in wartime strife. One student made a flag for the local cavalry while other students sewed clothing for Confederate soldiers. Though the college remained open during the war, enrollment remained precipitously low, causing many to wonder if the young institution would remain in existence.

This chapter draws on a close reading of Nadja Halilbegovich’s My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary (2006) in order to argue that its original entries and subsequent annotations demonstrate Marah Gubar’s kinship model of childhood studies, which privileges the relatedness, rather than the difference, between children and adults. It addresses first the content of Halilbegovich’s diary, which is concerned with charting the creative collaboration of children and adults under siege, and second, its form, which promises a rich negotiation between the author’s earlier childhood voice and the annotations she offers as an adult reader of her original diary.

The American support units of the ROK 8th Division and the ROK 3d Division were placed in danger because of the fall of these divisions. The enemy furthered south so that Support Teams A and B as well as Support Forces 7 and 21 could not escape. The defense of Saemal, Hoengsong, and other important escape routes determined the successful withdrawal. The enemy forces first took on the 38th Infantry that held Saemal. This chapter first looks into Captain Tate's experience as battalion S-3, how the War Diary of the Tank Company in the 38th Infantry Regiment described the patrol in Hoengsong, and how Cpl. James Lee provided additional information regarding the combat action.