Martha's Diary Entry Analysis

Analyzing, interpreting and presenting historical information involves dealing with great levels of uncertainty. As there exists limited artifacts which have survived the test of time, piecing together an era involves making educated assumptions. In the case of Martha Ballard, her diary provides us with a limited account of her life from 1785 to 1812. In both the movie and the book, the producers and the author have invested great effort into providing an authentic representation of Martha’s time as per her diary entries. This paper will discuss the difficulties faced by Ulrich, Richard P. Rogers and Laurie Kahn Leavitt in representing Martha’s time, the benefit of studying the lives of the marginalized and the ordinary people, difficulties in studying material culture and offer an analysis of quilts to make deduction regarding the women’s lives and their roles at the time.
Since the article is a diary, Ulrich struggled with finding routines or patterns from which she would be able to make deductions regarding the lives of everyday women during the era (Ulrich, 1994). According to Ulrich, the most tedious work was to count and catalog events in Martha’s diary (1994). Following this, the most difficult work involved piecing together the
By studying ordinary life, we can begin to understand the lives of past Americans both great and small. This is important because the those most represented in history tend to be the wealthy and influential. These people are unique and have had unique experiences. Hence, their experiences cannot be used to describe the lives of the majority of the people who existed and had ordinary lives. By studying the lives of ordinary people, we also get insight into the constrains and circumstances that influenced people’s decisions or results of