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Rachel Ann White of Weymouth, Massachusetts, kept this diary between 1834 and 1837 while she was between the ages of 17 and 20. The diary begins with White's trip to New York City in the summer of 1834. Entries after White's return home in mid-August 1834 shorten and become more abbreviated, giving accounts of her family, social, and educational life.

Her trip to New York was spent sight-seeing and visiting with friends and family. She visited such places as Niblo's Garden Theater, a Jewish synagogue, Trinity Church, the city of Hoboken in New Jersey, Scudder's American Museum, and Castle Garden (where she saw a balloon ascension by Eugene Robinson on July 4, 1834). She described the American Museum at length in her entry of July 29, 1834, seeing such things as "all manner of birds," "beasts and fish," and a number of wax figures in a room that also contained "a great number of Indian relics consisting of canoes, paddles, ornaments…[and] the skeleton of a child found in a cave in one of our western states."

White also attended the funeral procession of the Marquis de Lafayette on June 26, 1834, and visited a relative at the Bloomingdale Asylum at the end of her trip. After visiting at the Asylum, White returned home, describing in part the damage left after the New York anti-abolitionist riots of 1834.

When back in Weymouth, she spent her time going to meetings, socializing with friends and family, taking trips to the beach, going to church, playing cards, attending lectures on temperance, quilting, and more. White mentioned her studies, which apparently included ciphers, history, and especially astronomy, the latter of which White attended several lectures on and viewed the moon through a telescope while in New York.

In 1835, White became a schoolteacher. Details regarding her social life are frequent within the volume, including a close friendship: she spoke highly of a woman named Betsey, experiencing "more joy on meeting [her] than I can express" (September 23, 1835). She wrote about Betsey's health scares that led to her death in October of 1836, for which White was present: "the cold grave has taken to its bosom, one who with a single exception, is my dearest friend. Now futurity seems a blank. I have nothing to anticipate but gloom. Oh why was she taken! Would it have been me!" (October 27, 1836).

White did not make another entry until December 26, 1836; Betsey's death affected her deeply and she has remained at home with the exception of going to meetings. The last entry on the same day mentions a debating meeting she attended: "the question was whether the signs of the times were favorable to the perpetuity of a republican form of government. Mr. Lincoln, argued, nobly in the affirmative."

Overall, entries relate to social visits, attending temperance lectures, domestic affairs, education, and entering into the profession of teaching.