Historical Diaries

The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.

The Jesus diary is the up-dated version of the most comprehensive chronology of the events in the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of God ever written. Jesus, the Son of God visited this earth at a point in history. The Gospels in the Bible give four accounts of the one story of Jesus' birth, baptism in the Holy Spirit, his ministry, death and resurrection. The Jesus diary records all of those events in the correct order then places each one on a specific date in history. The result is the most detailed time-frame of the events in Jesus' life ever compiled.

2025 National Indie Excellence Award - Finalist for Historical Fiction 2025 NYC Big Book Awards - Distinguished Favorite for Historical Fiction The Diary of Essie Lassiter was an authentic read, with a strong female narrator blazing a fiery path in a harsh new world. Her voice was as captivating as her journey, and the world created around her was vibrant with the sights, sounds and smells of colonial life. – Reedsy Discovery In the runup to the Revolutionary War, a young English midwife is unsuspectingly thrown into the London Debtor’s Prison. With no prospect of retiring her debt, she...

A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon - from child to determined young adult to loving mother.

This is the original diary of the wife of Confederate General James Chesnut, Jr., who was an aide to President Jefferson Davis. It is a fascinating narrative of all the years of the American Civil War. It focuses on the daily lives and hardships of all who suffered through the war, from ordinary people to the Confederacy's generals and political elite. Mary Chesnut's prose has lost none of its provocative bite through the ages.

Drawing from the author's original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin's journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo More, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.

In the darkest years of Nazi occupation and genocide, Etty Hillesum remained a celebrant of life whose lucid intelligence, sympathy, and almost impossible gallantry were themselves a form of inner resistance. The adult counterpart to Anne Frank, Hillesum testifies to the possibility of awareness and compassion in the face of the most devastating challenge to one's humanity. She died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine.

Lady Janine Cook, daughter of the Duke of Sussex, is in turmoil. Her father's insistence on marriage by her next birthday leaves her in distress, especially since the match he's chosen is the oppressive and controlling Viscount Shardwood. To complicate things even further, although she can hardly admit it to herself, Lady Janine’s true feelings lay with another. Douglas Irvin, the Viscount who stole her thoughts, might be a friend of the family, but she knows her stubborn father will never change his mind. She can at least confess all of her heart’s secrets to her dear diary… When the...

Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.

Docia Ingalls was more than just the little sister of Charles "Pa" Ingalls from the Little House books. She was a spirited, fiercely independent, passionate woman, who experienced love, heartbreak, hard work, trials, and tribulations, but kept on going. She was a true pioneer woman from the hardy stock that filled the Ingalls family. A romantic, loving and naive young woman, she married twice, divorced once and birthed and raised nine children all the while doing the best she could with what she had. Married to an alcoholic whom she loved despite his faults, Docia carried her family and ...

The story of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan who consumed Parisian high society in the 19th Century, and the inspiration behind masterpieces such as Alexandre Dumas Fils' The Lady with the Camellias and Verdi's La Traviata, is one that overwhelms with its soul-searing tragedy. This peasant girl, who endured cruelty, abandonment, and the torment of a woman’s lot in her time, clawed her way through the class and cultural strata of Paris from one rich man to another, with her sensational beauty lighting the way. Yet her beauty wasn’t the only thing capturing hearts, but also her ...

Miranda Cheever has been blessed with many things, but great beauty is not among them. Still, when she meets Viscount Tuner, she knows she is meant for him. As the years go by, fate is as kind to Miranda as it is harsh on the Viscount. He's skeptical about love with good reason - but he may be falling for Miranda

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own...

In the vein of Inside Out and Back Again and The War That Saved My Life comes a poignant, personal, and hopeful tale of India's partition, and of one girl's journey to find a new home in a divided country It's 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two...

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The year was 1933, and the Great Depression had taken hold, but a young and adventurous writer, Ruthven Colquhoun McNairn, embarked on an incredible four month adventure from Hamilton Ontario to Chicago, Denver, and Colorado Springs exploring the cities and surrounding landscape, and then heading West, hitchhiking to Los Angeles through New Mexico, Arizona and California, capturing the unique people he met and traveled with and the strange new country he was exploring beautifully in his diary, which reads like a John Steinbeck novel.

For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex World War II relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject—the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.

The 38 letters written by Rockefeller to his son imparting his perspectives, ideology, and wisdom to his son.

Robin Maxwell’s debut novel introduces Anne Boleyn and her daughter, Elizabeth: one was queen for a thousand days, the other for more than 40 years. Both were passionate, headstrong women, loved and hated by Henry VIII. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, her mother’s private diary is given to her by a mysterious lady. In reading it, the young ruler - herself embroiled in a dangerous love affair - discovers a great deal about her much maligned mother.

Aged and increasingly ailing European film icon Lída Baarová is taken care of by her stepmother Marcela, a woman five years her junior. As Lida becomes distraught by the effects of the Parkinson disease ravaging her body, and riddled with the fear of dying, her stepmother thinks up a way to distract her—she should recount her life, and leave a lasting legacy to her fans. For the next several months, Marcela records on paper as the actress tells her story. In 1936, at the height of her career, the film star has it all—recognition, a man she loves, worshiping fans all over the continent...