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The Big Sourcebook of Free and Low-Cost Library Programming
300+ Resources, Ideas, and Tools
Ellyssa Kroski
American Library Association, 2024

There’s no need to spend hours trying to come up with creative programming ideas—bestselling library activity guru Kroski has already done all the hard work for you! Largely drawn from contributions by library workers across the country, this e-book is a cornucopia of ready-to-go activities, easily accessible resources, and adaptable tools for inspiring countless fun and engaging programs at your library. Best of all, these exciting low cost/no-cost library programs can be implemented using only free resources. Offering a broad selection of ideas for adults, tweens, and younger children that can be tailored to a variety of contexts, inside this sourcebook you’ll discover

  • seniors and older adult programming resources on such topics as genealogy, financial literacy, lifelong learning, gardening, and health and wellness;
  • career, ESL/literacy, and "just for fun" programs and book clubs perfect for adults;
  • young adult programming resources such as the Book to Action toolkit, YALSA’s Teen Programming Guidelines, literacy and educational resources, computers and coding activities, live action roleplaying games (LARPS), and many more;
  • free resources to teach financial responsibility to toddlers, lesson plans from NASA, resources to host an Earth Day event incorporating a “free trees for kids” program, StoryWalks and more ideas for children;
  • makerspace, STEM, and art programming resources;
  • Pinterest boards, idea lists, writing prompts, coloring pages, free books, and passive programming downloadables and printables;
  • information about more than two dozen grant opportunities for funding programs; and
  • planning templates, marketing tips, assessment resources, and tools for brainstorming and productivity.
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Fetterd Or Free
British Women Novelists, 1670-1815
Mary Anne Schofield
Ohio University Press, 1986
Traditional literary theory holds that women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century produced works of limited range and value: simple tales of domestic conflict, seduction, and romance. Bringing a broad range of methodologies (historical, textual, post-structuralist, psychological) to bear on the works of Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and others. Fetter'd or Free? encourages a re-evaluation of these elder sisters of the Brontes and Eliot.

In addition to examining the relationship between the minor female writers and the acknowledged greats of the age, these twenty-three essays focus on such issues as politics and ideology in the novel; the social, cultural, and economic context of the female writer; female character types and iconography; fictional and rhetorical strategies; and the development of such recurrent themes as imprisonment and subversion. What emerges is a much clearer view than we have had of the predicament of the female writer in the eighteenth century, the constraints on her freedom and artistic integrity, and the means by which she recognized, expressed, and responded to the conditions of this turbulent age.

The collection includes essays by Paula Backscheider, Patricia M. Spacks, Jerry C. Beasley, Margaret Anne Doody, Robert A. Day, and others. None of the essays has been previously published. In scope and variety, Fetter'd of Free? is unlike anything currently available. It will be of interest to both the specialist and the ambitious general reader and will initiate fresh dialogues among scholars of both eighteenth century literature and women's studies.
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Forever Open, Clear, and Free
The Struggle for Chicago's Lakefront
Lois Wille
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Of the thirty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline within the city limits of Chicago, twenty-four miles is public park land. The crown jewels of its park system, the lakefront parks bewitch natives and visitors alike with their brisk winds, shady trees, sandy beaches, and rolling waves. Like most good things, the protection of the lakefront parks didn't come easy, and this book chronicles the hard-fought and never-ending battles Chicago citizens have waged to keep them "forever open, clear, and free."

Illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, Wille's book tells how Chicago's lakefront has survived a century of development. The story serves as a warning to anyone who thinks the struggle for the lakefront is over, or who takes for granted the beauty of its public beaches and parks.

"A thoroughly fascinating and well-documented narrative which draws the reader into the sights, smells and sounds of Chicago's story. . . . Everyone who cares about the development of land and its conservation will benefit from reading Miss Wille's book."—Daniel J. Shannon, Architectural Forum

"Not only good reading, it is also a splendid example of how to equip concerned citizens for their necessary participation in the politics of planning and a more livable environment."—Library Journal
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A Free and Responsible Press
A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books
Edited by Robert D. Leigh
University of Chicago Press, 1974
The question of how much freedom the press should enjoy has been debated throughout American history. In 1942 an impartial commission was formed to study mass communication, evaluate the performance of the media, and make recommendations for possible regulation of the press. This book is the general report of that commission.

The Commission on Freedom of the Press began with the premise that freedom of the press is essential to political liberty; it is unique among the freedoms, for it promotes and protects all the rest. At the same time, the commission feared the concentration of media control into fewer and fewer hands, stating, "It [is] imperative that the great agencies of mass communication show hospitality to ideas which their owners do not share." The commission concluded that any regulation of the media must come from within, not from the government.
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Free as Gods
How the Jazz Age Reinvented Modernism
Charles A. Riley
University Press of New England, 2017
Among many art, music and literature lovers, particularly devotees of modernism, the expatriate community in France during the Jazz Age represents a remarkable convergence of genius in one place and period—one of the most glorious in history. Drawn by the presence of such avant-garde figures as Joyce and Picasso, artists and writers fled the Prohibition in the United States and revolution in Russia to head for the free-wheeling scene in Paris, where they made contact with rivals, collaborators, and a sophisticated audience of collectors and patrons. The outpouring of boundary-pushing novels, paintings, ballets, music, and design was so profuse that it belies the brevity of the era (1918–1929). Drawing on unpublished albums, drawings, paintings, and manuscripts, Charles A. Riley offers a fresh examination of both canonic and overlooked writers and artists and their works, by revealing them in conversation with one another. He illuminates social interconnections and artistic collaborations among the most famous—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gershwin, Diaghilev, and Picasso—and goes a step further, setting their work alongside that of African Americans such as Sidney Bechet, Archibald Motley Jr., and Langston Hughes, and women such as Gertrude Stein and Nancy Cunard. Riley’s biographical and interpretive celebration of the many masterpieces of this remarkable group shows how the creative community of postwar Paris supported astounding experiments in content and form that still resonate today.
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Free to All
Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920
Abigail A. Van Slyck
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Familiar landmarks in hundreds of American towns, Carnegie libraries today seem far from controversial. In Free to All, however, Abigail A. Van Slyck shows that the classical façades and symmetrical plans of these buildings often mask a complex and contentious history.

"The whole story is told here in this book. Carnegie's wishes, the conflicts among local groups, the architecture, development of female librarians. It's a rich and marvelous story, lovingly told."—Alicia Browne, Journal of American Culture

"This well-written and extensively researched work is a welcome addition to the history of architecture, librarianship, and philanthropy."—Joanne Passet, Journal of American History

"Van Slyck's book is a tremendous contribution for its keenness of scholarship and good writing and also for its perceptive look at a familiar but misunderstood icon of the American townscape."—Howard Wight Marshall, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"[Van Slyck's] reading of the cultural coding implicit in the architectural design of the library makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the limitations of the doctrine 'free to all.'"—Virginia Quarterly Review
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Free to Die for Their Country
The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II
Eric L. Muller
University of Chicago Press, 2001
One of the Washington Post's Top Nonfiction Titles of 2001

In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America's history.
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Free to Hate
How Media Liberalization Enabled Right-Wing Populism in Post-1989 Bulgaria
Martin Marinos
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Linking neoliberalism with the Right’s global rise

Bulgaria’s media-driven pivot to right-wing populism parallels political developments taking place around the world. Martin Marinos applies a critical political economy approach to place Bulgarian right-wing populism within the structural transformation of the country’s media institutions. As Marinos shows, media concentration under Western giants like Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and News Corporation have led to a neoliberal turn of commercialization, concentration, and tabloidization across media. The Right have used the anticommunism and racism bred by this environment to not only undermine traditional media but position their own outlets to boost new political entities like the nationalist party Ataka. Marinos’s ethnographic observations and interviews with local journalists, politicians, and media experts add on-the-ground detail to his account. He also examines several related issues, including the performative appeal of populist media and the money behind it.

A timely and innovative analysis, Free to Hate reveals where structural changes in media intersect with right-wing populism.

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Free to Lose
An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy
John E. Roemer
Harvard University Press, 1988
Attacking the usefulness of such central Marxian concepts as the labor theory of value and surplus value, John Roemer reconstructs Marxian economic philosophy from the concepts of exploitation and class, showing that exploitation can be derived from a system of property relations. He then looks at the causes of the unequal distribution of wealth, including robbery and plunder, willingness to take risks, differential rates of time preference, luck, and entrepreneurship. He further examines the evolution of property systems—slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist—from the perspective of the theory of historical materialism, and ends by analyzing the properties of a social system in which ownership of productive assets in the external world is public, while ownership of internal productive assets—skills and talents—is private.
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Freeing Charles
The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War
Scott Christianson
University of Illinois Press, 2010

Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. This engaging narrative represents the first in-depth historical study of this crucial incident, one of the fiercest anti-slavery riots after Harpers Ferry. Christianson also presents a richly detailed look at slavery culture in antebellum Virginia and probes the deepest political and psychological aspects of this epic tale. His account underscores fundamental questions about racial inequality, the rule of law, civil disobedience, and violent resistance to slavery in the antebellum North and South.  As seen in New York Times and on C-Span’s Book TV.

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Gleanings of Freedom
Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860
Max Grivno
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.
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God-Fearing and Free
A Spiritual History of America's Cold War
Jason W. Stevens
Harvard University Press, 2010

Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism.

Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion.

Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.

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Ivan the Terrible
Free to Reward and Free to Punish
Charles J. Halperin
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

 Ivan the Terrible is infamous as a sadistic despot responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, particularly during the years of the oprichnina, his state-within-a-state. Ivan was the first ruler in Russian history to use mass terror as a political instrument. However, Ivan’s actions cannot be dismissed by attributing the behavior to insanity. Ivan interacted with Muscovite society as both he and Muscovy changed. This interaction needs to be understood in order properly to analyze his motives, achievements, and failures.
Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish provides an up-to-date comprehensive analysis of all aspects of Ivan’s reign. It presents a new interpretation not only of Ivan’s behavior and ideology, but also of Muscovite social and economic history. Charles Halperin shatters the myths surrounding Ivan and reveals a complex ruler who had much in common with his European contemporaries, including Henry the Eighth.

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Labor, Free and Slave
Workingmen and the Anti-Slavery Movement in the United States
Bernard Mandel.Introduction by Brian Kelly
University of Illinois Press, 2006
A classic piece of Old Left scholarship made available to a new generation of students and activists

Bernard Mandel's classic study provides a concise overview of the relationship between organized abolitionism and the fledgling labor movement in the period before the Civil War. Mandel argues that slavery reinforced the powerlessness of white workers North and South, and the racial divisions that it upheld rendered effective labor solidarity impossible. Deep distrust between abolitionists and the working classes, however, compelled Northern workers to find their own way into the antislavery ranks.

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Not Slave, Not Free
The African American Economic Experience Since the Civil War
Jay R. Mandle
Duke University Press, 1992
Since its publication in 1978, Jay R. Mandle’s The Roots of Black Poverty has come to be seen as a landmark publication in the study of the political economy of the postbellum South. In Not Slave, Not Free, Mandle substantially revises and updates his earlier work in light of significant new research. The new edition provides an enhanced historical perspective on the African American economic experience since emancipation.
Not Slave, Not Free focuses first on rural southern society before World War II and the role played by African Americans in that setting. The South was the least developed part of the United States, a fact that Mandle considers fundamental in accounting for the poverty of African Americans in the years before the War. At the same time, however, the concentration of the black labor force in plantation work significantly retarded the South’s economic growth. Tracing the postwar migration of blacks from the South, Mandle shifts attention to the problems and opportunities that confronted African Americans in cities. He shows how occupational segregation and income growth accelerated this migration.
Instrumental to an understanding of the history of the political economy of the United States, this book also directs readers and policymakers to the central issues confronting African Americans today.
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Often, Common, Some, and Free
Samuel Amadon
Omnidawn, 2021
Poems considering ever-present transformations and resisting destruction.
 
This is a book about transformation. Moving across varied formal and aesthetic terrains, these poems take on the subject of change, considering the construction and demolition of buildings, roaming between cities, and drawing together an image of a world in flux. The speaker is in movement—walking, flying, swimming, and taking the train, while also constantly twisting in his sentences, turning into different versions of himself, and braiding his voice with others. These poems take on subjects that encompass creation and loss from Robert Moses’s career transforming the cityscape of New York to the robbery of works from Boston’s Gardner Museum. But, ultimately, these poems aim to resist destruction, to focus on the particular, and to hold still their world and their ever-shifting speaker.
 
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A Poetry Precise and Free
Selected Madrigals of Guarini
Nicholas R. Jones
University of Michigan Press, 2018
A Poetry Precise and Free collects 150 lyric poems by the Renaissance Italian poet Giovanni Battista Guarini in new translations, accompanied by the Italian originals and commentary that will enlighten and engage both scholars and general readers.  Guarini’s madrigals provide insight into northern Italian court culture of the late Renaissance, when poetry and music were enjoyed as companion arts. Hundreds of composers of Guarini’s day set his lyric poems to music. Primarily known today in their vocal settings, most famously those of Claudio Monteverdi, the poems merit appreciation in their own right.

This volume is organized into ten sections, grouping the madrigals around themes such as the anguish of passion, the asymmetry of desire, the incursions of jealousy, and the possibility of mutual bliss. Nicholas R. Jones renders Guarini’s poetry into accessible contemporary English verse that nevertheless stays true to the substance and form of the original texts, reflecting their roots in the Petrarchan poetic tradition and displaying the emotion and musicality that made these lyrics so popular from the start. A substantive introduction provides cultural context for the madrigals and their musical settings; brief commentaries follow each translation to illuminate aspects of poetic and rhetorical craft. An extensive appendix lists the madrigal compositions that set these lyrics for vocal performance.

The book fills a major gap in the scholarship on Guarini’s literary legacy. It will appeal to scholars of literature, Renaissance studies, and musicology, early-music performers, and general readers interested in poetry and classical music.
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The Pox of Liberty
How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection
Werner Troesken
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world. But that wealth hasn't translated to a higher life expectancy, an area where the United States still ranks thirty-eighth—behind Cuba, Chile, Costa Rica, and Greece, among many others. Some fault the absence of universal health care or the persistence of social inequalities. Others blame unhealthy lifestyles. But these emphases on present-day behaviors and policies miss a much more fundamental determinant of societal health: the state.

Werner Troesken looks at the history of the United States with a focus on three diseases—smallpox, typhoid fever, and yellow fever—to show how constitutional rules and provisions that promoted individual liberty and economic prosperity also influenced, for good and for bad, the country’s ability to eradicate infectious disease. Ranging from federalism under the Commerce Clause to the Contract Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, Troesken argues persuasively that many institutions intended to promote desirable political or economic outcomes also hindered the provision of public health. We are unhealthy, in other words, at least in part because our political and legal institutions function well. Offering a compelling new perspective, The Pox of Liberty challenges many traditional claims that infectious diseases are inexorable forces in human history, beyond the control of individual actors or the state, revealing them instead to be the result of public and private choices.
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Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free
Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience
Adelaida Reyes
Temple University Press, 1999
Sad songs and love songs. For Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam after the 1975 takeover by the Viet Cong, the predominant music of choice falls into these two general categories rather than any particular musical genre. In fact, Adelaida Reyes discovers, music that exiles call "Vietnamese music" -- that is, music sung in Vietnamese and almost exclusively written before 1975 -- includes such varied influences as Western rock, French-derived valse, Latin chacha, tango, bolero, an d paso doble.

The Vietnamese refugee experience calls attention to issues commonly raised by migration: the redefinition of group relations, the reformulation of identity, and the reconstruction of social and musical life in resettlement. Fifteen years ago, Adelaida Reyes began doing fieldwork on the musical activities of Vietnamese refugees. She entered the emotion-driven world of forced migrants through expressive culture; learned to see the lives of refugee-resettlers through the music they made and enjoyed; and, in turn, gained a deeper understanding of their music through knowledge of their lives.

In Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free, Reyes brings history, politics, and decades of research to her study of four resettlement communities, including refugee centers in Palawan and Bataan; the early refugee community in New Jersey; and the largest of all Vietnamese communities -- Little Saigon, in southern California's Orange County.

Looking closely at diasporic Vietnamese in each location, Reyes demonstrates that expressive culture provides a valuable window into the refugee experience. Showing that Vietnamese immigrants deal with more than simply a new country and culture in these communities, Reyes considers such issues as ethnicity, socio-economic class, and differing generations. She considers in her study music of all kinds -- performed and recorded, public and private -- and looks at music as listened to and performed by all age groups, including church music, club music, and music used in cultural festivals. Moving from traditional folk music to elite and modern music and from the recording industry to pirated tapes. Reyes looks at how Vietnamese in exile struggled, in different ways, to hold onto a part of their home culture and to assimilate into their  new, most frequently American, culture.

Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free will attract the attention of readers in Asian American studies, Asian studies, music, and ethnomusicology.
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Thinking with Whitehead
A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts
Isabelle Stengers
Harvard University Press, 2011

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengers—one of today’s leading philosophers of science—goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead’s thought. The product of thirty years’ engagement with the mathematician-philosopher’s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whitehead’s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whitehead’s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whitehead’s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language.

“To think with Whitehead today,” Stengers writes, “means to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.”

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To Free a Family
The Journey of Mary Walker
Sydney Nathans
Harvard University Press, 2013

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price—remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family’s fate.

This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family—Susan and Peter Lesley—who protected and employed her. Sydney Nathans’s sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker’s remarkable persistence as well as the sustained collaboration of black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter.

Unlike her more famous counterparts—Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth—who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker’s efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker’s journey, To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.

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