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Reviewed by:
  • Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863–1865 ed. by Judith Giesberg, and: Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis by Karsonya Wise Whitehead
  • Erica Armstrong Dunbar (bio)
Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863–1865. Edited by Judith Giesberg. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Pp. 240. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $16.95.)
Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis. By Karsonya Wise Whitehead. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 280. Cloth, $39.95.)

It is odd for two academic books to appear about identical topics in the same calendar year. When those books center on the life of a specific African American woman in mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, it is more than odd; it is almost implausible. Karsonya Wise Whitehead and Judith Giesberg have produced two outstanding books that focus on Emilie Davis and the pocket diaries that she kept between 1863 and 1865. Whitehead and Giesberg both set about the difficult work of editing the tiny diaries, encountering the challenges of penmanship, fading ink, and illegible words. Their tasks were Herculean, and both began their projects for different reasons and with different outcomes in mind. Although the subject matter is the same, these are two very different books that offer significant contributions to the field.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania purchased Emilie Davis’s diaries in 1999. These diaries, approximately eight to ten centimeters in length and six to eight centimeters in width, offer an extremely rare example of African American women’s lives, culture, and writings during a national transition from slavery to freedom. Born in 1838 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Davis was raised in Roxbury, Philadelphia, and attended a local public school. She was among the first generations of African Americans to receive a public school education in a city that had all but ended its relationship with the institution of human bondage. She lived with her nuclear family—a [End Page 115] mother, father, sister, and brothers—and later moved in with extended kinfolk. She attended church services at First African Presbyterian Church and furthered her education by attending the Institute for Colored Youth, the city’s most prominent school for African Americans. Even with an education, Davis spent much of her life as a domestic (the most typical type of employment for black women in the urban North). However, she also possessed dressmaking skills that offered her opportunities to make the additional income required to remain out of poverty’s grasp as she resided in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Emilie Davis was among the 250,000 free black women who lived through the era of the Civil War. She was not a member of the black elite, but she was not poor. As Whitehead writes, “Her experiences were exceptional, but they were not exclusive to her” (14). Davis’s life represents a world less known to scholars, especially those who work on African American women. Her daily diary entries reinforce what scholars of women have affirmed for more than four decades—that women of the “middling sort” or “regular folk” have a voice, and if we look hard enough, scholars will find these women.

Judith Giesberg introduces Davis to scholars not only through Emilie Davis’s Civil War, but also through the Memorable Days Project. In collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, the Richards Civil War Era Center, and Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library, the Memorable Days Project offers a digitized transcription of all three of Davis’s diaries. While there are some differences in punctuation, spelling, and word selection between the edited volume and the digital platform, the importance of the work remains unchanged. In Emilie Davis’s Civil War, Giesberg explains quite succinctly the importance of the pocket albums and what they offer to scholars of the nineteenth century. By examining what may appear to be mundane bits of everyday life, “we might learn a thing or two about what the war looked like through the eyes of a free black woman” (3). With a brief explanation...

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