Collection Description

This microfilm edition of pre-Revolutionary era diaries consists of 276 diaries written by 112 individuals from 1635 to 1790 and provides a rich and authentic portrait of incidents, manners, customs, and details of life in pre-Revolutionary America. The collection contains the diaries of a broad range of individuals, from farmers and businessmen to clergymen, soldiers, students, and physicians.

The diaries are arranged alphabetically, by author, on reels 1-11, followed by a reel of logbooks (reel 12) and a reel of orderly books (reel 13), also arranged alphabetically. Dates given for individual diaries, logbooks, etc., are terminal dates of entire volumes from earliest to latest entry. No effort has been made to identify omissions within these dates or to distinguish between such terms as "diary" or "journal"; regular or sporadic notations of personal, professional, or job-related entries are included. Many of the diaries were bound into interleaved almanacs.

Omitted from this microfilm edition, although a part of the MHS collections, are diaries and journals readily available in published format, for example the diaries of Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall, and John Winthrop.