Lectures on Tap - "Cold War Pen Pals?: American and Soviet Women"

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🧠 Lecture: "Cold War Pen Pals?: American and Soviet Women"

🎙️ Speaker: Alexis Peri

Join us for a captivating evening as prizewinning historian Alexis Peri uncovers an intimate, little-known chapter of the early Cold War. Drawing from her acclaimed book Dear Unknown Friend, Peri explores the remarkable correspondence between American and Soviet women in the late 1940s and 1950s, only recently discovered in a Moscow archive.

These letters reveal a powerful “diplomacy of the heart,” as women on both sides of the Iron Curtain shared their hopes, fears, and daily lives—and began to question why their nations were so bitterly divided. In an era of deep political polarization, their efforts to reach across borders and ideologies offer timely lessons for how we might bridge divides today.

Alexis Peri is an associate professor of history at Boston University and the award-winning author of The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad and Dear Unknown Friend. Her work has been honored by leading historical organizations, and she is currently writing a groundbreaking history of Soviet beauty pageants.

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