Visions of America: The Stephen White Collection

8vo. Illustrated. (Title-page detached and with library stamp.) Original grey buckram lettered in various colors. Provenance: Alice Morse Earle (gift inscription and a signed presentation bookplate); presented to the Long Island Historical Society.

FIRST EDITION. INSCRIBED BY EARLE. Anna Green Winslow (1759-1780) was a young girl from a prominent Loyalist family in Boston during the first stirrings of the American Revolution. Her diary, which she kept from 1771 to 1773, were bound up letters she wrote to her mother while living with her aunt in Boston and is one of the few surviving records of a young girl's experiences during that time. Her diary revealed details about the clothing, education, social events, and domestic activities of a young girl in pre-Revolutionary Boston. She wrote about attending sewing classes, going to church, and visiting friends and relatives. The diary also reflects her religious upbringing, as she often comments on sermons she heard and her personal reflections on faith. Her diary, since being first published in 1894, has never gone out of print.