A page, a day: A history of the daily diary in America (Pennsylvania)

Many take the daily diary for granted. Historians mine diaries for quotes to enliven the retelling of a seminal event. Today, ordinary men and women---artists, professionals, students, or stay-at-home moms---clutch their DayRunners or Filofaxes with no inkling that their mass-produced yet personalized tomes have a history. These diaries that divvy up our lives into regulated and recurring units in a predigested format look and feel the way they do for a reason. Nevertheless, few scholars have lingered long enough on the question of a diary's design to tell us why. This dissertation aims to answer this question as well as explain the appeal and proliferation of this diary genre by tracing its development from its introduction in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia to its late twentieth-century successors.; Paying attention to both the form and content of the diaries, I enlisted the methodologies of material culture historians as well as historians of the book. I wanted to know who produced these printed diaries and who used them---not only how, but why. I assembled a database of more than 200 diary collections spanning two centuries, sampling from different geographic locales, and including a variety of users of both genders and diverse socio-economic backgrounds. To glean the motivations of diary producers, I sifted through company records, trade catalogs, and newspaper advertisements.; The introduction of this genre and its growing popularity as a diary form throughout the nineteenth century signaled a shift in the way early Americans recorded and imagined themselves. It appealed to nineteenth-century consumers because it reflected and reinforced the changes around them in the way it presented the market and shifting conceptions of time, while simultaneously allowing them to exercise an expanding tendency toward introspection in little to no time. The diary's utility hid its real power. It may look to us today like a slice of ephemera, a glorified engagement calendar containing antiquated banking tables and currency charts. Yet, for many drawn to its format, it was a primer for modernity, guiding them in the new ways of the world.