This chapter discusses Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust as a distinctive form of literary production practiced by Jewish adults, youth, and children across Europe. Jewisih diaries took on particular significance in the context of the Holocaust. They open a window on the cultural, social, and political history of the Holocaust. By preserving victims’ voices, diaries contribute to the writing of new histories of the Holocaust, in particular because of the attention to gender and social relations among victims.

This chapter examines the experiences of children in the Holocaust in various geographic contexts. It raises questions about the avenues for rescue and survival of children and the limits of children’s agency. How did gender, age, and family background play a role? And how did children adjust to or resist their new – and supposedly temporary – separation from their families?

Pepys kept his diary for more than nine years, covering a variety of topics that is unrivalled among seventeenth-century diarists. This chapter explores why and how he did so, drawing on recent work which has expanded our sense of early modern life-writing. Pepys turned the methods seen in religious diaries and financial recording to his own ends. His diary’s purposes developed to include assessing his social status and his health; storing useful anecdotes; and relishing illicit pleasures. To illustrate Pepys’s techniques his account of Charles II’s coronation is examined, alongside his friend John Evelyn’s account of the same event. Pepys’s diary was a dynamic text: it evolved in response to Pepys’s changing needs and was intended to act upon him, stimulating favourable change in him and for him.

This chapter concentrates on another significant element of the Irish Catholic Church’s transnational fundraising, namely the collecting tours on behalf of church-building projects that Irish clerics regularly conducted in diaspora destinations, including but not limited to the US. Based on close analysis of a series of surviving personal diaries and letters produced by collecting priests in the second half of the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the difficulties, including hostile resident clergy, that collecting priests faced, explores the emotions of religious fundraising, for both giver and receiver, and assesses the place that such epic fundraising tours have in the narratives that surrounded Ireland’s newly built Catholic infrastructure.

This chapter examines forms of self-writing (memoir, autobiography, diaries, documentary prose, and other in-between genres) that demonstrate an ‘orientation toward authenticity’, to borrow the phrase of the writer-scholar Lidiia Ginzburg. The arc spans the late seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the period from the end of World War II to the late Soviet era, which witnessed an explosion of non-fictional narratives to document the war, camps, and Stalinist terror. The chapter takes its cues from Ginzburg’s theory that in-between prose is uniquely innovative when it fixes its attention on concepts of the self and literary forms, and that it flourishes most when canonical genres are in flux. In addition to the topic of childhood and, more centrally, personal encounters with history, the chapter discusses the role of women writers, and the sub-genre of the memoirs of contemporaries written by members of the intelligentsia.

This chapter documents our experiences of pivoting research on sexual and gender minority youth towards an online protocol using digital methods. Digital diaries presented an opportunity to conduct virtual longitudinal qualitative research on how youth describe their experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic in Vancouver, Canada. Our digital diary process, supplemented with remote interviews, allowed us to capture shifting health-related patterns and trends, establish capacity to identify and explore unanticipated areas of inquiry, and evaluate participants’ impressions of the method itself. While going digital allowed us to overcome some immediate constraints to participation, it also introduced new uncertainties, including equity concerns and issues around consistent, secure and safe digital access for research participants. We describe how features of young people’s lives remain important factors associated with their ability to participate in digital and remote research. We offer solutions to the challenges and conclude that to counteract the inequities arising from the shift to digital methods, we need flexible, adaptive and population-tailored digital and remote approaches to data collection.

Twentieth-century critics have opposed the supposed objectivity of the essay to the letter and diary as private, self-expressive, and autobiographical genres. But this was a modern development. From Michel de Montaigne to the early nineteenth century, the essay, the letter, and the diary were more alike and far more closely aligned than they later became, particularly with regard to representations of the self and notions of publicity. For instance, they were all considered forms of address, and means of presenting one’s intellectual physiognomy to others that were likely to be read aloud, shared, and discussed. This chapter therefore explores now-forgotten family resemblances among these genres both in form and function and concludes by showing where they were fused or embedded in one another.

This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

Cosima Liszt, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and Marie d´Agoult, rushed into an unsuccessful marriage with the composer and conductor Hans von Bülow. She wrote articles and visited cultural highlights in Berlin. In Munich 1864 she engaged in the love affair with Richard Wagner and a year later the child Isolde was born. She married him in 1870 in order to have the birth of Siegfried legalised and asked Bülow for a divorce. Her meticulous diaries of her life with him are a vital biographical source, although in them she perpetuates the traditional narrative of the autonomous male genius. After his death she took over the direction of the Bayreuth Festspiele and developed a style committed to Wagner’s performance practice. She excelled in matters of gesture, fusing singing aesthetic, gesture, and word/music relationship.

As an archive, the Anne Lister diaries are an extraordinary tale of survival, in that the diaries came close to being destroyed and their coded content was kept hidden until Helena Whitbread, an independent scholar from Halifax, published the first coded extracts with Virago Press in 1988. Gonda’s interview follows Whitbread’s journey of discovery into the coded sections of the diaries and the laborious process of decrypting the diaries by hand, before computers had become generally available. As Whitbread delved deeper into the Lister archive, her sense of its importance increased exponentially and she began to understand the need to have coded extracts from the diaries published as a book available to the public. Whitbread then published a second volume of extracts in 1992 and she discusses what made her decide to focus on Lister’s intimate relationships in the vast five-million-word archive available to her. Currently working on an Anne Lister biography, Whitbread shares her own affective relationship with the Lister diaries over the years and responds to the unprecedented fame Lister has achieved in part as a result of the Gentleman Jack series. This has included key transformations in Whitbread’s own public life as one of the founders of Lister scholarship.

The introduction outlines the aims, methodology and time frame of the book, explains its structure and briefly introduces readers to the eight individuals whose diaries are the book’s principal source material. A succinct review of the literature on elite and popular ruralism in Britain follows, emphasizing that there has been far more research on the former than the latter. The pathbreaking work of Helen Walker, Harvey Taylor and Alun Howkins on popular ruralism is acknowledged and summarized. Although we now know much about the macro-history of popular ruralism (at least as expressed through the outdoor movement), we know much less about its micro-history – how the countryside fitted into the lived reality of people’s lives. This is the gap which this book aims to fill.

Diaries are rich but sometimes challenging sources for historians, not least because of their particularity, which can make it difficult to generalize from them. This chapter outlines some of the ways scholars have approached diaries, highlighting the comparative method used by historians such as James Hinton. The relationship between, in Fothergill’s words, ‘the first-person narrator who speaks in the diary and the historical personage who held the pen’ is considered and Huff’s view that we should read diaries as ‘friendly explorers’ endorsed. Questions relating to when, why and for whom a diary may have been written are discussed and the equally important issue of what a diary omits or suppresses. The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined. Finally this chapter explains the principles on which the diaries on which the book is based were selected and the extent to which they may or may not be representative.

This chapter examines Tolstoy’s treatment of mortality – from his earliest published works to his last, and in letters, diaries, and conversations – as a long preparation for his own death. It draws especially from his later period, when he drew nearer to death and became increasingly focused on it, often reminding those around him, and his reading public, of their need to do the same. Thus, while Tolstoy anticipated death as a personal sacrament, he also created a context for the public to consider his passing as a collective examination of his values. The chapter concludes with Tolstoy’s death at Astapovo railway station in 1910, where he attempted to meet his own expectations for this moment within the spectacle created by a public bent on treating it as its own rite of passage.

This chapter looks at a selection of diaries written by British farmworkers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It falls into two parts. The first is a broad overview that seeks to define the farm diary and draw attention to some recurrent characteristics. The second explores how rural work and landscape, and the relationship between them, are represented in eight contrasting farm diaries. In concluding, I will consider how a survey of farm diaries affects our understanding of Georgic and Pastoral, and the adequacy or otherwise of these lenses for looking at the representation and experience of rural work and landscape. The gap between rural labour and its representation is less in farm diaries than in any other kind of georgic. Typologically, then, the farm diary could be regarded as the most basic, even foundational, form of georgic writing. What comes through most strongly in studying farm diaries is the depth of engagement of those who wrote them with land and landscape.

Chapter 12 explores the question of how the Jewish people might understand the “after” in “after the Holocaust.” These concluding reflections entail an examination of several questions: What should be the Jewish response to the radical assault on the Judaism that makes the Jewish soul Jewish? How do Jews recover a name in the aftermath of the ubiquitous, systematic assault on their names, their souls, and the Name of the Holy One? The chapter takes up these questions through an examination of a tale from the Torah that fundamentally defines the Jews and Judaism: the account of Jacob at Peniel, when Jacob wrestled the name of Israel from the Angel of Death, from God Himself. After the Holocaust, the most stark and extreme manifestation of antisemitism, the Jews confront just such an angel - and God Himself - in an effort to recover a remembrance and a name, a yad vashem. The name that the Jews must once again wrestle from God is Yisrael, Israel, which means “one who struggles with God and humanity.”

Chapter 10 shows how what began with philosophy’s rendering God superfluous ended in a war against the God of Abraham. Here we have the singularity of the Holocaust, which lies in a singular assault on the Jewish people as the perennial witnesses to that God the God of Abraham. Drawing on the testimony of the Holocaust diaries, written within the whirlwind of the assault on God, this chapter demonstrates that this defining feature of the Holocaust can be seen, for example, in the Nazis’ use of the holy calendar in the execution of their actions, in the prohibitions against prayer and Sabbath observance, in the destruction of synagogues and Hebrew Bibles, and in the targeting of children, elders, and mothers. What the diaries reveal about the essence of Holocaust that the historians cannot, it is argued, is this: The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of not just of the bodies but of the souls of the Jews as a means of annihilating the God of the Jews. It is unprecedented and unparalleled.

The Crimean War was not the first time Britons made their ways to the Black Sea peninsula, but it was the decisive occasion to place the land in the national consciousness, giving rise to travel narratives in newspapers, diaries, and letters. These accounts by wartime adventurers provided ways of understanding the Crimea, cosmopolitan and foreign in British eyes, during the conflict and after. Even while showcasing far-away lands, they showed Britons, the English especially, to be reluctant travelers, glad to head homeward at war’s end. After the troops exited the peninsula and across the Victorian age, return narratives cast the Crimea as a place of memory and self-discovery. During the twentieth century, global politics made the peninsula a stage for world wars and for international diplomacy, culminating in the Yalta Conference of 1945. In the postwar era and until the 2014 Russian invasion, the peninsula became a tourist destination, giving Britons a view behind the Iron Curtain and a glimpse of a post-Soviet Age. Across these changes, Crimean War narratives provided frameworks that allowed Britons to understand history, apprehend travel, and assess themselves.

This essay surveys the literate culture of the antebellum and Civil War eras among marginal southerners – African Americans, both free and enslaved, and poor and middle-class whites – and explores examples of the ways reading and writing, though quite distinct in formal pedagogies, blended together in the literary lives of the self-educated. Focused especially on Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a yeoman farmer in North Carolina whose diary records his reading practices as well as original verse, and John M. Washington, a Virginia man who kept a diary while enslaved, the essay presents a study in the surprising complexity and variegation of the textual landscape such people inhabited and helped create. It also discusses the scarcer archival traces of the literacy practices of ordinary southern women.