"Young, brazen, beautiful, and unapologetically brilliant, Margaret Fuller accepts an invitation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the celebrated Sage of Concord, to meet his coterie of enlightened friends. There she becomes "the radiant genius and fiery heart" of the Transcendentalists, a role model to a young Louisa May Alcott, an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne and a friend to Henry David Thoreau. And so she charts a singular course...

In the fall of 1942 a young black law student at Howard University visited a class in constitutional law taught by one of the nation's leading historians: so began the decades-long friendship between Pauli Murray, the student, and Caroline Ware, the historian. This collection of their letters begins in 1943 and continues (with few interruptions) until Murray's death in 1985. The correspondence illuminates a significant period in what is now labeled...