Speaking of notebooks, I'm reading this book about King Philip's War. It's tremendous, but one of the throughlines goes like this:
The English in Massachusetts were obsessed with the written and printed word (evidently a feature of Protestantism but whatev). But over and over, in their personal diaries, they say things like "on the events of the war, I won't comment, but leave it for the official record."
The official record, in their minds, absolutely superceded their own accounts...
...To the point where they didn't even keep their own accounts.
Which is a terrible loss to us, future people looking backward for a deeper understanding. The "official record" (there were a few) was a generation later and basically purely ideological.
Mary Rowlandson's famous account of captivity by the Wampanoags, she basically had to be strongarmed by Increase Mather into writing and publishing it. His introduction says "please read this as an instructive account of the goodness of God during a time of trial, not as a self-glorifying attention grab on the part of the author." That's how the audience at the time might have taken it.
Not only because she was a woman, but because ANY private writing might be taken that way.
Anyhow, it's a good book. The Name of War by Jill Lepore.
Where we live, we're barely on the outskirts of an important battlefield of King Philip's War. We go to the public reports of the battlefield archaeology group and stuff.
In fact, last week's Picnic & Game Design meetup was there in the park on the battlefield.