Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread: A Woman's Diary of Life in the Rural South, 1890-1891 (President's Series in Arkansas & Regional Studies)

From June 11,1890, to April 15, 1891, Nannie Stillwell Jackson wrote with pencils in a small ledger the best and meanest moments of her life on a small farm in southeast Arkansas. The combination of dreariness and charm that informs the diary is found on every page in the accounts of social gatherings, floods, poultry trades, dress-hemmings, and deaths. The experience is rich and awful, as is also what we may learn from it about the human spirit on the edge of civilization.