The World Outside Mary's Farm

This is very close to the title of one of the chapters in the book but the theme actually runs throughout the book in other chapters. One of the things that intrigued me in researching was the backdrop of what else was going on while Mary wrote about the harvest or visiting family or planting her garden.

Long before I started writing the book, when I was still doing general research and trying to get the diary entries in their proper place, I explored events happening on the national or global stage. For much of the diary time period, I could find "year in review" articles in newspapers where they would recap their major stories of the year. A lot of these tended to be where one group was warring with another group, political leaders who died or were elected or deposed, celebrities who did something notable, etc. But they also included scientific discoveries, breakthroughs in medicine, records broken, or big news in human interest topics.

I specifically looked for this type of article in the Des Moines papers that Mary subscribed to or those where her children lived. These were the things she would most likely have read or heard about, personally, and may have commented on in her diary. I also looked at major newspapers from other parts of the country ...Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Dallas... ones that would report national and global news.

These lists would generally have the events organized by month and I made lists for months and years, even where there were no diary entries in that time period. I would select items from the lists and add them to my diary file under the month and year before the actual diary entries, as in the diary image below. 

How did I select which events to include? Mostly, I selected things that I found interesting or thought important. This skewed heavily toward inventions/discoveries in medicine and science, events I'd heard of but didn't know exactly when they'd happened, famous people who died, and US top-level news like presidents elected or states added to the union. I also kept an eye out for anything that Mary tended to write about.

The World Outside Her Farm chapter presents background on events that Mary actually referenced in her diary. However, other chapters also relied on some of this research, even if it wasn't explicitly presented that way. For example the catalog of events by month and year allowed me to describe the development of flight from the Wright Brothers' first flight (which Mary never mentioned in her diary) to  her attendance at an air expo 8 years later.