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Author Henderson, Aileen Kilgore, 1921-2023, author

Title The World through the Dime Store Door A Memoir / Aileen Kilgore Henderson
Published Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2020]
Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 0000
[2020]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (pages cm)
Series Book collections on Project MUSE
Summary "In the 1930s, the rural South was in the throes of the Great Depression. Farm life was monotonous and hard, but a timid yet curious teenager thought it worth recording. Aileen Kilgore Henderson kept a chronicle of her family's daily struggles in Tuscaloosa County alongside events in the wider world she gleaned from shortwave radio and the occasional newspaper. She wrote about Howard Hughes's round-the-world flight, her dreams of sitting on the patio of Shepheard's Hotel to watch Lawrence of Arabia ride in from the desert, and her horror at the rise to power in Germany of a bizarre politician named Adolf Hitler. Henderson longed to join the vast world beyond the farm, but feared leaving the refuge of her family and beloved animals. Yet, with her father's encouragement, she did leave, becoming a clerk in the Kress dime store in downtown Tuscaloosa. Despite long workdays and a lengthy bus commute, she continued to record her observations and experiences in her diary, for every day at the dime store was interesting and exciting for an observant young woman who found herself considering new ideas and different points of view. Drawing on her diary entries from the 1930s and early 1940s, Henderson recollects a time of sweeping change for Tuscaloosa and the South. The World through the Dime Store Door is a personal and engaging account of a Southern town and its environs in transition told through the eyes of a poor young woman with only a high school education but gifted with a lively mind and an openness to life."-- Provided by publisher
Notes Description based on print version record
SUBJECT Henderson, Aileen Kilgore, 1921- -- Childhood and youth
Henderson, Aileen Kilgore, 1921-
Henderson, Aileen Kilgore, 1921- fast
Subject Young women -- Alabama -- Tuscaloosa -- Biography
Clerks (Retail trade) -- Alabama -- Tuscaloosa -- Biography
New Deal, 1933-1939.
New Deal.
Clerks (Retail trade)
Manners and customs
New Deal, 1933-1939
Social conditions
Young women
SUBJECT Tuscaloosa (Ala.) -- Biography
United States -- Social conditions -- 1933-1945. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140517
Tuscaloosa (Ala.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Subject Alabama -- Tuscaloosa
United States
Genre/Form Biographies
Form Electronic book
Author Project Muse. distributor.
LC no. 2020027457
ISBN 0817393307
9780817393304