Story of American Freedom - Hardcover

Eric Foner

3.93

675 ratings by Goodreads

9780756758042: Story of American Freedom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0756758041 ISBN 13: 9780756758042

Publisher: Norton, W.W., 1998

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Over the course of American history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans & a cruel mockery for others. Here, freedom's story is an open-ended history of accomplishment & failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations & sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated & anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its cast of characters ranges from Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, & Ronald Reagan, from former slaves seeking to breathe real meaning into emancipation to the union organizers, freedom riders, & women's rights advocates of our time. "A landmark American history for all readers." B&W illustrations.

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Review:

Freedom, Eric Foner writes, is "the oldest of clich�s and the most modern of aspirations." But what does it mean to be free? For the people of the United States, the concept of "freedom"--and its counterpart, "liberty"--have had widely differing meanings over the centuries. The Story of American Freedom, therefore, "is not a mythic saga with a predetermined beginning and conclusion, but an open-ended history of accomplishment and failure, a record of a people forever contending about the crucial ideas of their political culture."

Foner begins with the colonial era, when the Puritans believed that liberty was rooted in voluntary submission to God and civil authorities, and consisted only in the right to do good. John Locke, too, would argue that liberty did not consist of the lack of restraint, but of "a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power." Foner reveals the ideological conflicts that lay at the heart of the American Revolution and the Civil War, the shifts in thought about what freedom is and to whom it should apply. Adeptly charting the major trends of 20th-century American politics--including the invocation of freedom as a call to arms in both world wars--Foner concludes by contrasting the two prevalent movements of the 1990s: the liberal articulation of freedom, grounded in Johnson's Great Society and the rhetoric of the New Left, as the provision of civil rights and economic opportunity for all citizens, and the conservative vision, perhaps most fully realized during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, of a free-market economy and decentralized political power. The Story of American Freedom is a sweeping synthesis, delivered in clearheaded language that makes the ongoing nature of the American dream accessible to all readers. --Ron Hogan

About the Author:

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is the prize-winning author of many books, including the landmark work Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution and A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln, available in Norton paperback.

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