Martha's Diary and Mine

The following essay was my acceptance speech at the Bancroft Prize award dinner, Columbia University, April 3, 1991. Since the award ceremony follows a sumptuous dinner, prize winners are encouraged to save their sophisticated historiographie insights for another occasion and "be personal." This is what I said: I spent eight years studying the diary of Martha Moore BaUard, an eighteenth-century Maine midwffe. As I was flunking about how I could explain that to you, I remembered my own diary. It is a pretty miserable affair compared to Martha's—four ruled notebooks with intermittent entries scattered over fifteen years, but when I went back to read what I had written I was surprised to discover how much it told me about my Ufe with Martha.