We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2023
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 The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined.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.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
