The Diary Review

‘Jeff Davis is to emancipate eight hundred thousand slaves - calls them to arms, and promises fifty acres of land to each. Prodigious, marve...

James or Jimmi Calhoun, soldier in the US Army, was born 170 years ago today. He married George Custer’s sister, and was transferred to Cust...

It is 150 years today since the death of George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer remembered for his remarkable diary, which provides a ne...

‘Today is my birthday and it’s the first one I ever spent on a train. Arrived Chicago at 1pm. Had a three-hour layover then caught the 4pm t...

‘This morning there comes a dispatch from Chattanooga stating that the enemy had taken Fort Donelson. Generals Pillow, Floyd, Buckner with t...

‘By golly, what a day! It is seldom that days which one has anticipated in imagination for weeks or months ever measure up to one’s expectat...

‘He explained his call to my astonishment that Beadle, Tatum, and I were to be the co-recipients of the Nobel prize in medicine this year. I...

‘My heart was beating like some young student’s before the big exam. Was I going to be able to step out onto this land that I have been stri...

Malcolm X, one of the US’s most influential black activists, was assassinated 60 years ago today. He was not yet 40. Having come from a depr...

‘Perversion interests me most and is really my guiding darkness . . . I love to write of cruel deeds.’ This is Patricia Highsmith, who died ...