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editorial methods My research into the life of Emilie Davis actually began about six years ago when I received photocopies of her pocket diaries and began the painstaking process of transcribing and annotating her entries. Since Emilie’s diary pages and a different transcription can now be found online, my goal was to present a heavily annotated reader-friendly version while still preserving her intent and style.1 Transcribing the diaries was both time consuming and difficult, owing to Emilie’s handwriting, the ink smudges, and the faded pages; therefore, the process of transcription entailed many methodological decisions on my part as a researcher. I worked directly on paper copies made from the original diaries and spent a considerable amount of time learning Emilie’s writing. Many times I used a pencil to trace over her words in an effort to try and understand what she was writing. Since she took both French and German, there were times when I believed that she was attempting to use these words (sometimes incorrectly) in her entries. In those cases, I translated the word to the best of my ability and then provided the meaning. Thus, with “Yesterday, quite a remarkable au courant [my emphasis] meeting at Mrs. Rivers,” I am guessing that she meant “au courant,” which is French for “aware.” She also could have meant “a current” meeting, writing “au” for “a” and misspelling “current.” Because Emilie wrote for herself and did not revise her entries, there are a number of grammatical and spelling errors, as well as mistakes in capitalization and punctuation. I completed three drafts of the transcriptions constantly checking them against the original diaries; my research assistant then completed an additional transcription once the initial corrections had been made. Along the way, I made various corrections and edits to the text, using the following guidelines to help organize my work: Emily, Emilie, or Emlie In the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Census, in the 1863 Report of the Ladies’ Union Association of Philadelphia, and on both her death and marriage certificates Emilie Davis’s name is spelled using the English spelling: Emily; at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and in the front of her 1863 and 1864 pocket diaries, her name is spelled using the French spelling of her name: Emilie; and, in the front of her 1863 pocket diary, where she wrote her name in ink and in cursive, she spelled it Emlie: three different spellings. Thus far, I have been unable to locate a birth certificate for her; therefore, in this book, I have elected to use the French spelling of her name—as it xiv Editorial Methods seems to be the spelling she preferred in 1864 and 1865 (as well as the spelling of her daughter’s name). Unfortunately no pictures of her or her family have been found. Colored, Black, or Mulatto In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, published a series of opinion editorials from the free black community that documented their attempts to find a term to describe themselves that everyone could agree on. This discussion included a number of choices, including Afric-Americans, Africans, Africanamericans, Americans, Colored, Colored Americans, Negroes, and Niger.2 The newspaper does not indicate that an agreement was ever reached, and in many ways, since then, there has been an ongoing debate about what is the most appropriate term to call African people who were involuntarily bought to America and have since become an integral part of the fabric of this country. In the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Census, Emilie is classified as mulatto, but, in her diary, in the two places where she racially self-identified, she called herself “colored.” During the mid-nineteenth century, the term mulatto was used to describe free blacks that had lighter skin and Caucasian features; and the term black was used to indicate either an enslaved person or a free person who had darker skin and African features. At times the racial classifications were randomly applied to family members. For example, in 1850 and 1860, Emilie’s mother, sister, and younger brother were classified as mulatto, while her father and older brother were classified as black. The term colored was actually a social term used interchangeably with the terms black and mulatto. Later sections will describe the politics around the use of these terms, and in an effort to narrow the scope of the discussion, I actively employed a black feminist perspective and decided to use...

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