Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread: A Woman’s Diary of Life in the Rural South, 1890-1891

From June 11, 1890, to April 15, 1891, Nannie Stillwell Jackson wrote about the best and meanest moments of her life on a small farm in southeast Arkansas. The combination of dreariness and charm that forms the diary is absorbing. Jackson’s experience is rich and awful, as is what we may learn from it about the human spirit on the edges of civilization.