“The I’s of a Diary: writing history from personal narrative” is a lecture that contextualizes two sets of unpublished diaries, and that discusses a strategy for reading them.
Owned by Miriam Hoyt Gregg and Wayne R. Sweetser, these diaries, written by mother and daughter, Adwina (Addie) O’Brien Richardson (1851-1941) and Amy Richardson Sweetser (1896-1958), span nearly a century from 1871-1950. The two women lived in Maysville and Presque Isle, Maine, their entire lives.
Though most entries are brief, they fill more than 100 separate journals, weaving a rich tapestry of personal and public experiences that draw the reader into their worlds in ways that detached, third-person history cannot.
Diaries, frequently characterized as “windows,” give us restricted views that, as historical sources, must be contextualized within both personal and public spaces. To reconstruct lives from diaries, we must chose a strategy for reading them that allows us, when we write, to make the lives accessible and the telling legitimate. The reader must account for the ways in which sex, age, class, and race in the context of time and place affect both the personal narratives that appear in the diaries, and the ways in which they are interpreted.
Pamela Snow Sweetser has taught at Hampden Academy for more than 30 years. She also taught at Fort Fairfield High School. An Aroostook County native, Pam has retired from education and spends her time writing and farming with her husband Wayne. She is a doctoral candidate in U.S. Women's History at the University of Maine, Orono. Her dissertation title is, "The harder I work, the more there is to do: rural women and modernization, Aroostook County, Maine, 1870-1940."
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