By mapping the quandaries of racial equality in Atlantic revolutions, A Frail Liberty contrasts the treatment and status of two colonial populations with African ancestry to document the link between exceptionalism and political inclusion.

From the author of Bough Down, a found, collaged and lovingly amended inquiry into how women disappear Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life. In this rescued history, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the incessant din of violence. Constance--one half of a sister duo put to work performing as musical prodigies in the dirt-poor town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. during the Great Depression--escapes as a teenager to the USO and tours a ravaged Italy during World War II. Soon after she returns to an unsparing life in New York City, she disappears. Green traces her dissolution in a deftly composed trove of letters Constance writes to her beloved sister and those she receives from dozens of men smitten by her stage persona, along with her drawings, collages and altered photographs. Though told mostly from Constance's point of view, Frail Sister is also haunted by the voices of the transient, the absent and the dead. The letters (a few real, many invented) expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief. Nimble, darkly funny and poignant, Frail Sister is possessed by the disappeared, giving voice to the voiceless, bringing into a focus a life disintegrating at every edge.

A Frail Liberty traces the paradoxical actions of the first French abolitionist society, the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks), at the juncture of two unprecedented achievements of the revolutionary era: the extension of full rights of citizenship to qualifying free men of color in 1792 and the emancipation decree of 1794 that simultaneously declared the formerly enslaved to be citizens of France. This society helped form the revolution’s notion of color-blind equality yet did not protest the pro-slavery attack on the new citizens of France. Tessie P. Liu prioritizes the understanding of the elite insiders’ vision of equality as crucial to understanding this dualism. By documenting the link between outright exclusion and political inclusion and emphasizing that a nation’s perceived qualifications for citizenship formulate a particular conception of racial equality, Liu argues that the treatment and status distinctions between free people of color and the formerly enslaved parallel the infamous divide between “active” and “passive” citizens. These two populations of colonial citizens with African ancestry then must be considered part of the normative operations of French citizenship at the time. Uniquely locating racial differentiation in the French and Haitian revolutions within the logic and structures of political representation, Liu deepens the conversation regarding race as a civic identity within democratic societies.

1862: The Union holds Baltimore, but this city, with its southern attitudes and divided sentiments, is a port of enormous potential value to the Confederate cause. Defending Baltimore is a man disdainfully called the "Black German." Branden Rolfe, a European revolutionary, fled the oppression of his home in Austria and now serves freedom as the city's Union Provost Marshal. When Rolfe learns of the Sons of Liberty, a secret group of secessionists determined to capture Baltimore, he fears their success could alter the course of the conflict. The war has already separated him from his adopted children and the woman he has learned to love. Now, the threat of the Sons, led by the clever, dedicated Langdon Everett, becomes a thorn in his side as the group gains supporters and amasses a considerable cache of weaponry and explosives. Rolfe feels official pressure and a personal need to stop them at all costs, even to the point of risking the life of his love, who volunteers for dangerous duty undercover. . . Eden Farnswood comes to the Sons through her new friend, Holly DeMornay, the cousin of their leader. Appalled by the terrible human cost of war, young Mrs. Farswood is a widow who set out to become a nurse but has found a new mission in the Sons of Liberty. Torn by bitter memories and divided loyalties, Eden finds it too painful . . . and too dangerous . . . to share her secrets with anyone, not even Holly, her closest friend. As Rolfe's web of spies closes in on the Sons of Liberty and Langdon Everett, the fates of Baltimore and of Eden Farnswood hang in the balance. In Baltimore, where North and South meet, love and war conspire so that, win or lose, there will be a terrible cost either in lives or by the betrayal of the human heart.

More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America’s culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.InFreedom for the Thought That We Hate, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas—political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America’s great founding ideas.

Here is the story of how the Statue of Liberty got its pedestal when Joseph Pulitzer, a Jewish immigrant and famous newsman, created one of the first American crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for it. When Joseph Pulitzer first saw the Statue of Liberty's head in Paris, he shared sculptor Auguste Bartholdi's dream of seeing France's gift of friendship stand in the New York harbor. Pulitzer loved words, and the word he loved best was liberty. Frustrated that many, especially wealthy New Yorkers, were not interested in paying for the statue's needed pedestal, Pulitzer used his newspaper, the New York World, to call on all Americans to contribute. Claudia Friddell's text and Stacy Innerst's illustrations capture this inspiring story of how one immigrant brought together young and old, rich and poor, to raise funds for the completion of a treasured national monument.