8 Famous Diaries That Changed How We See History

Though many of us with diaries of our own pray they never meet the light of day, some go on to become indispensable historic time capsules or hugely influential works of literature. From the World War II-era Amsterdam to 11th-century Japan, the diaries on this list reveal personal truths that long outlast their authors.

Offering first-person witness to some of the most pivotal moments in human history, these private musings helped shape the way we look at history.

1. The Diary of a Young Girl
2. Scott’s Last Expedition
3. The Diary of Samuel Pepys
4. The Sarashina Diary: A Woman's Life in Eleventh-Century Japan
5. Zlata’s Diary
6. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
7. The Diary of Anaïs Nin
8. A Confederate Girl’s Diary

The Diary of a Young Girl

By far the most widely known work on our list, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is arguably one of the most impactful works of literary nonfiction of the 20th century. Written by a teenage Frank during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Frank’s diary chronicled her family’s two-year stint hiding in Amsterdam before they were discovered by the Nazis in 1945.

Given to Anne as a present for her 13th birthday, Anne would write in her diary to Kitty, an imaginary friend Anne would address her entries to, chronicling the family’s cloistered existence hidden in the annex attached to her father’s business in Amsterdam.

Though the family had managed to avoid detection by the Nazis for more than two years, their time in hiding would come to a close on August 4, 1944, after Nazi forces received a tip about the Franks’ hidden annex and had them arrested. Following their discovery, all four members of the Frank family would be sent to concentration camps. Though Otto Frank would manage to survive his time in the concentration camps, his wife Edith and daughters Margot and Anne would all perish before gaining freedom.

Following the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Otto returned to Amsterdam in search of his surviving family members, only to find none had made it out of the concentration camps with the exception of himself. Upon returning to Amsterdam, Miep Gies, one of Otto’s employees who helped hide him and his family, gave Otto the copy of Anne’s diary she’d recovered shortly after the annex was raided.

After preparing the diary for publication, Anne’s diary was first released in 1947, becoming an instant critical hit. Since its initial publication in Dutch, the diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and has sold more than 35 million copies worldwide.

Scott’s Last Expedition

In June 1910, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott departed Wales aboard the Terra Nova on a historic journey to Antarctica. After Scott and his crew spent much of 1910 and 1911 establishing a string of supply depots in preparation for a groundbreaking journey to the South Pole, Scott finally began the long march to the geographic South Pole in late 1911.

After an arduous journey with the express goal of becoming the first explorers to reach the South Pole, Scott and his men finally made it to their destination on January 17, 1912, but found they had been beaten there by a group of Norwegian explorers who’d arrived about a month earlier. Defeated, Scott and his team left the South Pole to head back to their main base at Cape Evans on Ross Island. On their journey back to Ross Island, the group of five explorers faced severe weather, exhaustion, and quickly dwindling rations. Over the weeks-spanning journey, Scott and each member of his crew would succumb to the elements.

A little over half a year later, the remains of Scott and two members of his crew would be discovered frozen inside their tent just 11 miles from their next supply depot. The search party that had found Scott’s body was able to recover his journals, a harrowing account of the grim final days the group of explorers faced. An indispensable historic and scientific chronicling of the Antarctic, Scott’s journals were edited and published in 1913 as Scott’s Last Expedition.

Though some experts have questioned Scott’s capability as a leader and explorer, he remains a regarded and fabled figure in the history of Antarctic exploration.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Written by English politician Samuel Pepys between 1660 and 1669, The Diary of Samuel Pepys was first published in 1825 to much critical fanfare. Providing firsthand accounts of epoch-defining Restoration era episodes like the Great Fire of London and the city’s bubonic plague outbreak, Pepys’s meticulously crafted journals would go on to become an indispensable primary source for historians of England’s Stuart Restoration.

Alongside vivid accounts of the beginnings of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Pepys’s journals came complete with tales of everything from political upheaval to his purchasing of a new wig. Pepys spent the vast majority of the 1660s carefully chronicling his life through his diaries, his entries only stopping near the end of the decade when his failing eyesight prevented him from writing in the diary himself.

Despite this, Pepys’s parliamentary connections and talent as a political operator would afford him an illustrious career in government that would credit him with reforming and elevating the English Admiralty despite having no maritime experience himself.

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The Sarashina Diary: A Woman's Life in Eleventh-Century Japan

Written by Japanese noblewoman Lady Sarashina, The Sarashina Diary is an 11th-century memoir depicting the conflicted inner life of a lady-in-waiting during Heian-period Japan.

Thought to be collected sometime in the 1050s, The Sarashina Diary traces Lady Sarashina’s journey from Japan’s rural provinces to the imperial capital to assuming her place as a mid-ranking noblewoman at Imperial court. Contrary to other memoirs of the time, Lady Sarashina’s work is characterized by its contemplative nature, deep introspection, and rumination as opposed to a careful cataloguing of royal happenings.

An indispensable insight into the rich, often conflicted interiority of Japanese noblewomen of the time, The Sarashina Diary offers a humanizing, illuminating look into the minds of a group of women often overlooked by historians. While the diary would remain an artifact of cultural history for hundreds of years, it wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that a modern publication of the work in English brought the diary to wider international attention.

Zlata’s Diary

Shortly before her 11th birthday, Zlata Filipović began keeping a diary she nicknamed “Mimmy” after her late pet goldfish. Initially chronicling Zlata’s stereotypical preteen preoccupations like piano lessons, school, and MTV, the young girl’s diary took a decidedly darker turn when the Bosnian War finally reached Zlata’s home of Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

For the next two years, Zlata would fill her diary with harrowing firsthand accounts of the siege of Sarajevo, detailing rampant starvation and the seemingly incessant bombings of the city that forced Zlata and her family to spend much of their time cowering inside bomb shelters.

After one of Zlata’s teachers encouraged an aid organization to publish parts of Zlata’s diary locally, the young girl’s writing caught the attention of Robert Laffont, a French publisher who sought to translate and publish Zlata’s diary internationally. Quickly garnering international attention and acclaim, the publication of Zlata’s diary helped organize an extraction to Paris for her and her family before they ultimately settled in Dublin, Ireland.

Once settled in Paris, Zlata embarked on an international media tour to promote the book, providing chilling accounts of the grim conditions in Sarajevo since the beginning of the siege in 1992. Often contrasted with Anne Frank, Zlata’s diary is an invaluable source detailing the plight of Bosnian civilians during the siege of Sarajevo.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

Often described as “the first modern lesbian,” Anne Lister was a British landowner and estate manager known for her unconventional proclivity for men’s clothing and fierce sense of independence. Born to a wealthy, landowning family, Lister traveled extensively across Europe and Latin America, recording her journeys in her diaries.

Alongside detailed accounts of her travel and day-to-day life, Lister kept extensive, coded entries about her romantic liaisons with other women, most notably Ann Walker, a wealthy heiress Lister “married” in a ceremony at Holy Trinity Church in York. After they wed, the couple moved in together at Lister’s Shibden Hall and lived out the rest of their days as a happily married couple.

After Lister died from injuries sustained during a fall from a horse in 1840, her coded diaries remained hidden from the public at Shibden Hall for many years. In the early 1930s, scholars and Lister’s descendants began examining the diaries in an attempt to crack the code Lister had written them in.

Though much of the diaries and their passages detailing Lister’s sapphic relationships were decoded by the mid-20th century, Lister’s recognition as “the first modern lesbian” would not come until 1988 when her diaries were published by English Heritage as The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. A fascinating portrait of the gender politics of the Georgian and early Victorian era, Lister’s diaries are an engrossing look into a woman who refused to kowtow to the social confines of her time.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin

One of the most prolific diarists of the 20th century, French-American writer Anaïs Nin famously kept a journal from the age of 11 until her death at the age of 73 in 1977. Spending time living in Europe, Cuba, and the United States, Nin would later solidify herself as a central figure of the literary scene through forging close relationships with writers like Gore Vidal, Robert Duncan, and Henry Miller, a novelist whose extramarital affair with Nin would be chronicled in Henry and June.

A pioneer in confessional and introspective writing, Nin’s diaries centered on the female experience, art, literature, and psychology, often overlapping with one another in what would become Nin’s trademark experimental style.

Initially controversial for her frank discussion of female desire and sexuality, Nin’s diaries would come to typify the kind of discursive, psychoanalytical writing that would influence contemporary writers like Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Gilbert. Though many of Nin’s diaries were published during her lifetime, uncensored editions containing more explicit sexual content, the actual names of her literary paramours, and her insights into her complicated family history would be included in posthumous publications of her diaries.

A Confederate Girl’s Diary

Born to a wealthy, slave-owning Louisiana family, Sarah Morgan Dawson is best known for her richly detailed diaries kept during the American Civil War. Written between 1862 and 1865, Dawson’s diary provides a captivating firsthand account of what day-to-day civilian life looked like in the South throughout the Civil War.

Just 19 years old when she began keeping her diary, Dawson’s journals chronicle her family’s displacement during the war and interactions with Union soldiers. Though Dawson made efforts to preserve her diaries for future generations, she never sought to have them published during her lifetime. After passing away in 1909, Dawson’s diaries passed to her son, Warrington, who heavily edited the diaries to exclude personal family information and untoward political comments before publishing them.

Following the conclusion of the Civil War, Sarah and her family relocated to South Carolina, where Sarah would begin writing for Charleston’s The Post and Courier under the pseudonym Mr. Fowler. After her husband, Francis Warrington Dawson, passed away in 1889, Sarah relocated to Paris to live with her son until her death in May 1909.

By 1913, Dawson’s son Warrington would have Sarah’s heavily edited Civil War diary published as A Confederate Girl’s Diary. The diary would be published again in the early ‘90s as Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary Of A Southern Woman, this time with far more of Sarah’s original writing included, giving a fuller, more accurate picture of Sarah’s life in the South during the Civil War.