In this episode, we step back in time to explore early 20th-century Iowa through the pages of a century-old diary. Host and award-winning podcaster, Vedant Akhauri, welcomes author Sue E. Burns to discusses her book, A Common Life: A Voice from the Progressive Era.Sue’s book brings to life the diary of her great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Briggs, offering an intimate portrayal of rural womanhood and everyday history. The diary entries, which date back to 1888, provide rich historical detail. Sue E. Burns explains:Preserving History: How the diary pages, found tucked away in an attic, were beginning to disintegrate and how she and her mother transcribed the cursive, pencil-written notes on newsprint to preserve them in an electronic format.A Time of Rapid Change: The entries span the Progressive Era (1888 to 1922), a time of rapid technological and social changes. Mary Anne witnessed remarkable shifts, including the traffic on her dirt road changing from animal-drawn vehicles to automobiles. She also chronicled major national events like World War I and the devastating 1918-1919 flu pandemic—all occurring in a pre-antibiotic era.Female Resilience: The book highlights Mary Anne's self-sufficiency after her husband's death in 1903, when she took over the management of her farm, orchard, and livestock. She engaged in extensive canning to be self-sufficient and was an early version of female entrepreneurship for her time.Meticulous Research: Sue details her commitment to non-fiction, deciding not to novelize or fictionalize anything. She explains how she conducted a deep dive into the research, verifying Mary Anne’s accounts using historical documents such as court records, land deeds, and newspaper accounts from the era, tracing the original land ownership back to 1859.Relevant Themes: Sue explains that the book is organized around themes (not strict chronology) to show how topics, such as Mary Anne's reading habits or her evolving feelings about the war and the mandated Liberty loan bonds, changed over the course of the almost 40 years of documentation.This episode is a testament to the power of seemingly ordinary people documenting their lives and how their records offer profound insights into the past.A Common Life: A Voice from the Progressive Era is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle formats.If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a rating to be notified of future episodes. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram @letstalkmediava.