WHY A “LOG”?
Before biography, there are “logs”—masses of data involving the subject of a biography that must be read, related, collocated, interpreted, and reinterpreted with every account of the subject’s life. Think of a “log” as the raw material out of which a narrative biography might be shaped. (The Poe Log, edited by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, is a well-known example).
The EOS Log today is a woefully incomplete document, but some moments in her life are more accessible than others. For example, scholars and students have recently managed to discover a fair number of events surrounding Oakes Smith’s turn to feminism in the early 1850s, along with her lecture career that followed. Jonathan White’s remarkably researched biography of Oakes Smith’s son Appleton, along with the work of other scholars in the 1980s and Oakes Smith’s diary of that period, give us a good idea of her life during the Civil War. But there are whole decades of her life about which we know next to nothing—persons with whom she corresponded whose relation to her or her family remain completely hazy. Making the Log public at this stage offers researchers better datapoints than can be gleaned from a quick read of the “Chronology” in this section of the website, and likely more detail than any biographical document ever published on Elizabeth Oakes Smith (just use the search button upper right to find any word or date in any record), but this is also an invitation for those discovering new events to share them with the Oakes Smith Society so they can be incorporated into the larger picture. It will take the contributions of a crowd to arrive at a point where a full biography of EOS becomes possible.
Use this form to contribute to the EOS Log. Detailed instructions are provided on the form.
The challenge of this or any such project is the feeling that small details don’t amount to much. Why bother recording the mention of EOS in a letter by another well-known (or lesser known) figure, or an EOS poem published in an obscure Portland journal—in 1829 or 1889, or the inclusion of Oakes Smith’s name in a seemingly insignificant newspaper editorial in Louisville, Kentucky? In and of themselves, these events may not amount to much, but any of these might bring new light on what we already know.