Quotes from Nancy Rubin Stuart

Like most well-built Russian homes, Spaso House had been 'furred in', built with an extra layer of wall between the exterior and interior to provide additional insulation against the cold.

By 1937 Soviet standards, mementos of Russian history before the 1917 revolution were irrelevant. Even the suggestion that china, jewelry, or furniture created for the imperial palaces of the tsars was worth more than its weight in gold might be construed as anti-Soviet propaganda.

While music may be the food of love, it can also serve as solace for love's demise.

Human existence, he believed, was a series of spiritual gradations through which man evolved to a higher state by virtue of his deeds.

Life on the road, even for a worldly man like C. W. Post and his well-bred daughter, presented certain challenges. although he could order meals, fasten Marjorie's buttons, and make sure that she was properly dressed, C. W. could not fix her hair.

Even late marriage and childbirth didn't seem to deter this new young population of women from continuing to hold down paid jobs.

Something untoward was happening to middle-class American women, an undercurrent of i change was seeping through heir ideas about duties and obligations as mothers, eroding their desire to conform to madonna-like models of unconditional devotion to the young child to adapt a more managerial concept of mother as coordinator and motivator of her child's activities and interests.

Who, after all, was to say, what was the 'right side' of the war, especially after the turmoil, the food shortages, and scarcity of luxuries?

Having scanned the faces of the spectators, Andre mounted the wagon, stood on the coffin, removed his hat, and lowered his shirt collar. "It will be but a momentary pang,' Dr. James Thacher heard him say. Seizing the noose, Andre brought it over his head, tied a knot under his left ear, and placed a handkerchief over his eyes. When asked for his last words, the British officer raised his handkerchief. 'I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.

Temporarily at least, thoughts of war were dispelled by those of love. Before long, that timeless knot would entwine General Arnold and 'the handsomest woman' in America in a union whose intrigues remain controversial.

Motherhood, as our nation, has always know it, was being practiced in a bold new way, preempted by the priority of the regular paycheck.

Modern woman have discovered that living through another's reflection is simply not human enough.

In a rare moment of self-awareness, the young woman even understood that her dependence was probably unhealthy. Henry, she declared, was a man 'whom I love too much for my peace.

Boston lay in shambles. During the winter months, shivering redcoats had chopped down trees in the Common and ripped apart old buildings for firewood. The Flucker mansion had been looted. Other homes and shops were abandoned, crumbling, ruinous reminders of Boston's pre-Revolutionary splendor.

On April 30 Lucy cheerfully reported that, after three days' illness, she was on the mend. Although she had no mirror, she could feel twenty pockmarks on her face. 'I am almost glad you do not see it.," she wrote, "I don't believe I should get one kiss and yet the doctor tells me it is very becoming.

In late summer, when sprays of purple loosestrife, goldenrod, and ripening cranberries burst into color along the old road cutting through the Great Marsh of West Barnstable on Cape Cod, the air vibrated with the drumbeat of cicadas, the caws of seagulls and geese.

A young woman's ability to read beyond the bible had little practical value.

To soften relations between the two groups and meet Philadelphia's fashionable young beauties, Arnold hosted a ball at the... City Tavern with a guest list that included Tories and neutralists, as well as patriots. Inevitably the 'disaffected' emerged triumphant, their beaded gowns gleaming in the candlelight, their two-feet--high hairdos towering over the caps of patriot woman in their crude clothes.

Hysterical. That word had unfortunate ramifications.

Women did not yet have the vote, but suffrage was clearly in the wind

Within a day Mercy heard the news. She never forgot it. A few months later, that riot became the backdrop for her first political satire.

Discretion was bred into the Shippens' bones Whatever arguments, embarrassments , or regrets the family expressed were hidden behind their handsomely polished front doors.

Her conclusions were not always favorable, but she rarely aired her negative opinions about others even to her closest friends.

In the wake of that uproar, Boston settled into a sullen calm, probably at the stern insistence of Sam Adams, who reprimanded the street gangs, printers and "wharf rats" who often identified themselves as Sons of Liberty.