For centuries, people have kept personal records and logs of important information about everything from lunar eclipses, famines, and changes in world leaders to personal information about the trials and tribulations of life in many different settings. Journals, or diaries, have provided powerful insights into the past.
Originating from the French word journée, meaning “from sunrise to sunset” or “the distance travelled in a day,” journals began as a means of guidance on long trips or as a way to orient the traveler home. Diarists have long described historical events, and explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and Admiral Robert Peary all kept personal accounts of their adventures (Seaward, 2014; Thompson, 2011). “Many important historical perspectives have been gained from the written passages of Vermont farm wives, homesteaders on the Oregon Trail, schoolteachers in the Southeast, and panners in Alaska’s Klondike gold rush” (Seaward, 2014, p. 245). Anne Frank wrote one of the most famous journals, depicting her life as she and her family and four friends hid from the Nazis during World War II. Translated into several languages, made into films, theater productions, and even an opera, Anne Frank’s diary has profoundly affected millions of readers through the years. Today, U.S. presidents (following in the tradition of John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Harry S. Truman) as well as space shuttle astronauts keep daily journals.
During the past half century, journaling began to be used in individual therapy with other coping techniques for personal growth as well as in programs such as Outward Bound (a risk-taking program loosely based on American Indian rite-ofpassage customs) and vision quest programs (where participants often embark on multi-day self-exploration programs) (Seaward, 2014; Seaward, 2016).
Many individuals keep diaries as adolescents, when they write about everything from mundane thoughts to deeply moving events. As they transition to adulthood, they may leave the diary behind but still kept to-do lists, appointment books, notes on calendars, or perhaps boxes of poems, short notes, ideas for another day, and lists of goals or dreams. Even these abbreviated entries provide sketches of their lives (Rew, 2009).