Frances Wright dared to take Thomas Jefferson seriously when he wrote, ' All men are created equal, ' and to assume that 'men' meant 'women' as well. Born in Scotland in 1795, she came to the United States in 1818, and spent half her adult life here, she died in Ohio in 1852, ending a lifetime devoted to promoting equality among the races and the sexes. The Marquis de Lafayette called her his adored Fanny and paid court so openly that he scandalized even his own family. The first woman to act publicly to oppose slavery. The pampered daughter of a highly stratified class society, she cast her lot with the working people, risking her health, her fortune, and her good name to realize the promise of the Declaration of Independence. With a boldness rare in women of her day, she attacked in print and in lecture halls throughout the country an economic system that allowed not only black slavery in the South but what she called wage slavery in the North. With the exception perhaps of Walt Whitman, she wrote more powerfully of sexual experience than any other American the nineteenth century.

In her fifties, Mrs. Frances Trollope became famous overnight for her book attacking the United States. Twenty-five years later, she sharpens her pen for her most controversial work yet -- the biography of her old friend, the radical and feminist Fanny Wright. She recalls the 1820s when the young Fanny erupted into the Trollopes' sleepy English cottage like a volcano, her red hair flying, her talk aflame with utopian ideals. Before long, Wright convinced her to follow her to America, a journey of extreme penury, frontier hardships, and the most satisfying sensual romance of Frances Trollope's life. Fanny: A Fiction is a wonderful new departure for Edmund White -- a quirky, dazzling story of two extraordinary nineteenth-century women, and a vibrant, questioning exploration of the nature of idealism, the clay feet of heroes, and the illusory power of the American dream.

The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present is a short, lively history of the world’s most exciting and diverse metropolis. It shows how New York’s perpetual struggles for power, wealth, and status exemplify the vigor, creativity, resilience, and influence of the nation’s premier urban center. The updated second edition includes nineteen images and brings the story right up through the mayoral election of 2009. In these pages are the stories of a broad cross-section of people and events that shaped the city, including mayors and moguls, women and workers, and policemen and poets. Joanne Reitano shows how New York has invigorated the American dream by confronting the fundamental economic, political, and social challenges that face every city. Energized by change, enriched by immigrants, and enlivened by provocative leaders, New York City’s restlessness has always been its greatest asset.

Originally published as Course of Popular Lectures, the works collected in this volume display the gift for oratory and range of progressive ideas that made Frances Wright (1795-1852) both a sought-after lecturer and a controversial figure in early nineteenth-century America. Born in Scotland, this pioneering freethinker and abolitionist emigrated to America in her twenties and became friends with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In 1828, she joined Robert Dale Owen's socialist community at New Harmony, Indiana, and helped him edit his New Harmony Gazette. The next year she and Owen moved to New York City, where they published Free Enquirer, which advocated liberalized divorce laws; birth control; free, state-run, secular education; and organization of the disadvantaged working class. It was at this time that she began delivering the popular lectures here collected. Some persistent themes that run throughout these well-argued pieces are: the importance of free, impartial inquiry conducted in a scientific spirit and not influenced by religious superstition or popular prejudice; the need for better, universal education that trains young minds in scientific inquiry rather than religious dogma; the advantage of focusing on the facts of the here-and-now rather than theological speculations; and the failure of American society to live up to its noble ideals of equality and justice for all. With an insightful introduction by Wright scholar Susan S. Adams (Emeritus Professor of English, Northern Kentucky University), these stimulating lectures by an early and little-known feminist and freethinker will be of interest to students and scholars of women's studies, humanism, and freethought.