About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherShe Writes Press

ISBN-101631529315

ISBN-139781631529313

eBay Product ID (ePID)201669160

Product Key Features

Book TitleDearest Ones at Home : Clara Taylor's Letters from Russia, 1917-1919

Number of Pages272 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2014

TopicWomen, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, General, Institutions & Organizations, Women's Studies, Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies), Customs & Traditions

IllustratorYes

GenreReligion, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, History

AuthorPatricia Maloney

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Length8.5 in

Item Width5.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2014-940918

SynopsisOn November 5, 1917, Taylorville, Illinois native Clara Taylor stepped off a Trans-Siberian Railway train into a city then called Petrograd, Russia. Employed by the YWCA as an industrial expert, Clara had been sent to Russia to help establish Associations in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and Moscow. Her main charge while in Russia was to survey and report on factory conditions, but Clara only spent a fraction of her stay in Russia visiting factories; due to the vagaries of the political, social, and economic revolution--the upheaval of an entire culture--Clara and her colleagues spent most of their first year in Russia teaching English, home economics, book keeping, literature, and basketball, and sponsoring lectures, dances and sing-alongs for Russian working women. Clara's letters, collected in this book, tell of both the mundane and the extraordinary: what the YW staff ate for dinner; how the Bolshevik suppression of free speech impacted Americans' ability to communicate with those at home; shootings in the streets; bartering for pounds of sugar; conversing with nobility, with intellectuals, and with workers; attending the opera; and sight-seeing at monasteries. Together, Clara's letters to her family--her "dearest ones at home"--tell a compelling story of one American woman's experiences in Revolutionary Russia., - Dearest Ones at Home is unusual in its content: first-person (primary source) historical documents from a turbulent time in Russia's-and the world's-history. - The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi have brought Russia's past and present into the spotlight in the US and around the world. - Recent TV and film productions set during WWI, especially Downton Abbey, have sparked renewed interest in that time period within the US.

LC Classification NumberDK265.7.T38 2014