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Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier
Chris Enss
Twodot

115 pages
Non-Fiction

I really enjoyed this book. I bought it as research for a future project, but ended up losing myself completely in its pages.

As the subtitle states, the book is composed of several stories of women and men who met through correspondance during the second half of the XIXth century and the first two decades of the XXth. Each chapter tells a different story with a few of them dedicated not to specific couples, but to people or institutions that helped bring those couples together. There's a good selection of stories, they cover people in different situations and not all of them have happy outcomes.

I loved that the book includes a lot of material from the time: journal and letters excerpts; personal ads; newspaper articles; photographs and prints. It also includes a rather detailed bibliography (which non-fiction books don't always seem to do anymore) that I think will be of good use to me when I'm in full research mode for the project I mentioned.

Also, the book really opened my eyes to how many preconceived ideas I still held about life in the West and the role of women in the expansion.

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