The diary of Keziah Brevard evokes the mundane concerns of the plantation period. It also documents her reflections on the events leading up to the American Civil War: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention and the attack on Fort Sumter.

I don't Know Anybody who has ever done such a daring thing as I have done", twenty-two-year-old Aileen Kilgore of Brookwood, Alabama, wrote in her diary in January 1944, after enlisting in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. From basic training in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to her discharge in late 1945, Kilgore served as one of more than 150,000 American women who joined the Women's Army Corps -- the first group of women other than nurses to serve in the ranks of the United States Army. Aileen Kilgore Henderson has now collected and edited diary entries and personal letters that...