ABSTRACT
This chapter explores historical studies that use diaries as sources of social observation, in circumstances that were novel for the diarists, in these cases of incarceration and of factory work. It discusses the historical insights that personal records can yield, as well as the ways in which subjectivity erupts from even the most observational diaries into the historian's line of vision. The chapter describes the central place of gender in the process of managing the self, specifically the shaping of masculinity and femininity, within the pages of a diary. It also discusses historical studies informed by feminism that treat diaries of the early nineteenth century and the 1930s as crucibles of masculinity. The chapter also explores historians' engagement with the opposite phenomenon to psychic integration within the diary: contradiction and incoherence. In Patrick Joyce's hands the diary as a technology has intellectual, emotional and material components.
