John F. Marszalek is professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University and the author of Court Martial: A Black Man in America and Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order.

Two months before the Civil War broke out, Emma Holmes made the first entry in a diary that would eventually hold vivid firsthand accounts of several major historical events. Born into an elite South Carolina family, Holmes was in her twenties during the war years. She lived in Charleston during the April, 1861, bombardment of Fort Sumter and was visiting there during the 1863 Union shelling of the city. Her description of the Charleston fire of December, 1861, which destroyed her family home and leveled much of the city, is one of the most powerful passages in the diary.
John F. Marszalek has eliminated extraneous details in order to highlight Holmes's individual insight, the vital heart of the volume. His new Foreword considers this valuable contribution to social history in the context of the current growing popularity of the Civil War and the relatively recent interest in that conflict among women's studies scholars.