Nosy for a reason: doctoral student researching history of personal journals in America
By Steve Anable
Contributing Writer
Molly McCarthy's job is poking her nose into other people's business - into yellowing almanacs from colonial times and the faux leather diaries with miniature locks and keys manufactured during the 1940s and 1950s.
The Brandeis history doctoral student is writing a dissertation examining the daily diary in America. Working with her advisor, Associate Professor of American History Jane Kamensky, she is studying how the physical form of the diary impacts individuals' attitudes toward time, their lives, and sharing information or keeping it private.
The Buffalo, N.Y., native brings skills honed during a journalism career that netted her team of reporters a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for covering the crash of TWA flight 800 off Long Island. She is also part of the first generation of scholars to sift cyberspace for clues to America's past.
"What did the daily diary look like during the late 18th century?" McCarthy asks. "And what did people do with it when they got it home?
McCarthy believes that market changes, which drove alterations in the physical appearances of diaries, transformed the ways diarists recorded their lives and even the way they thought about time.
Spare paper was relatively scarce during the late 18th century, so Colonial-era diarists wrote wherever they could find space to record their thoughts. They often used the blank pages of commercially printed almanacs. Then, during the 19th century, stationers began manufacturing diaries specifically designed for this purpose.
Did this inspire diarists to be more dutiful in filling these pages? Did it coax them to write longer or shorter entries, or change the content of what they wrote? McCarthy is out to answer questions like these, examining, so far, more than 200 diaries.
McCarthy believes the sense of privacy changes through the centuries. Some diaries tell stories that she finds "incredibly moving." Other 19th century diaries labeled "private," or with some other notation marking them as meant only for their owners,"reveal absolutely nothing." Privacy becomes almost "fetishized" during the 1940s and 1950s, when diaries with locks and keys were manufactured for young girls. "There's also a change of perception about what diary-keeping is about, that diary-keeping is seen as a practice for women and not men," McCarthy says. "This is a perception. I don't know that women are more likely to keep diaries than men. I don't think this necessarily was the case."
Not limiting herself geographically in her search for materials, McCarthy is going further and further afield to collect diaries from different regions of the country, travelling to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass., and the Hagley and Winterthur Museum in Delaware.
And McCarthy is venturing where some scholars have never trod: into cyberspace. She's been bidding on eBay, the auction Website, to find material to use for her thesis. Says McCarthy, "eBay has enriched my diary project immensely by introducing me to diary forms I never knew existed, like Boy Scout diaries, and by allowing me to handle other relics, like 18th century almanacs, to get a feel for how their owners may have used them."
Interestingly, McCarthy has never kept a diary of her own, though she admits that in one instance she wishes she had, to record her thoughts and emotions while covering the TWA 800 crash for the New York newspaper Newsday.
What's transferable between the very varied experiences of journalism and academia? Respect for deadlines, of course, a "great interest in writing," and "organizing huge amounts of material." She says, "I'm working the archives instead of the phone."