To Raise Myself A Little The Diaries and Letters of Jennie, A Georgia Teacher [Paperback]

THOMAS G. DYER (1943-2013) was University Professor Emeritus and Vice President for Instruction Emeritus at the University of Georgia. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta and The University of Georgia: A Bicentennial History, 1785–1985 (Georgia).Amelia Akehurst Lines’s diaries and letters provide an extraordinarily rich record of the attitudes and values of an “average” American woman of the mid-nineteenth century. Lines was a young New York schoolteacher whose ambition drove her to seek new opportunities in rural Georgia. Her letters and diary entries provide keen observations on Georgia society and yield a great deal of information concerning the family, child-rearing, and other facets of everyday life in both the North and the South. Lines’s life, says historian Thomas Dyer in his introduction, is testimony to the mythical quality of the nineteenth century’s conventional wisdom that hard work, piety, and personal commitment were all that was needed to reap the promise of American life.

The publication of To Raise Myself a Little rescues from obscurity materials that shed light on a particularly interesting nook in American history. Together these writings provide a complex portrait of the work life, marital history, health problems, religious views, and social attitudes of an aspiring middle-class American woman of the mid-nineteenth century.

Amelia Akehurst Lines’s diaries and letters provide an extraordinarily rich record of the attitudes and values of an average American woman of the mid-nineteenth century. Lines was a young New York schoolteacher whose ambition drove her to seek new opportunities in rural Georgia.