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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Alexis Peri, "Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Description: In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies.In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women's letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a "diplomacy of the heart" that led them to question why their countries were...