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 Santa Clara County and San Mateo County health officials are recommending that all non-essential gatherings be cancelled. The well-being or our community is our top priority so we are following those recommendations and cancelling this event.

Rose Pastor Stokes didn't deserve to disappear from America's memory. Her life story— from pauper to society wife to socialist reformer and back to poverty— has been waiting for the right storyteller to revive it. Social historian Adam Hochschild is exactly that writer.

Rose Pastor was a Russian immigrant in 1903, working as a child in cigar factories. Her marriage into high society coincided with the rise of American socialists and anarchists—groups she and her husband befriended. From there she led worker strikes and campaigned with feminists for distributing of birth control information, earning notoriety as “one of the dangerous influences of the country.” Her impassioned, persuasive rhetoric moved audiences to tears. How then did she topple back into poverty and obscurity?

Adam Hochschild applies the same scholarly diligence and engaging, approachable writing style to Stokes' story as he did to King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts. This Bay Area treasure joins Kepler's Angie Coiro on stage for a conversation our fans of history, politics, and a good story will love.

Tickets to Kepler’s Literary Foundation events are not tax-deductible. Tax deductible donations can be made online at keplers.org/donate

Photo of Adam Hochschild by the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.