Freedom, Eric Foner writes, is "the oldest of clichés 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


From Library Journal
Distinguished Columbia historian Foner frames American history as a continuing fight for freedom.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
Wonderfully readable . . . an excellent choice for serious readers.


Los Angeles Times Book Review
Eric Foner's brilliant, important book . . . shows how, having invoked liberty to justify their independence in 1776, Americans have fought ever since over what that freedom means and who may enjoy its blessings


The Washington Post Book World, Warren Goldstein
In The Story of American Freedom, Foner has extended his reach, exploring how Americans have agreed and disagreed over the meaning of freedom, from the revolutionary era to the mid-1990s. Broadly synthetic, this ambitious book looks at the entire sweep of American history through the lens of freedom: who had it and who didn't, how people thought about it, spoke about it, wrote about it, claimed it, and lamented its misuse.


Boston Sunday Globe, 18 October 1998
[A] thoughtful, readable history of the most highly esteemed and least-well defined of American virtues.


From Booklist
The concept of "freedom" as a driving force in American history is often dismissed by Marxists, neo-Beardians, and revisionists as a smoke screen to cover the clash of competing economic interests. Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, acknowledges that different groups put different slants on the meaning of freedom. He also deals effectively with the exclusion of various groups from the benefits of freedom. Nevertheless, Foner sees America's commitment to freedom as a genuine, living ideal, which has inspired its citizens and driven them to heights of achievement and sacrifice. In a panorama of the struggle for freedom, Foner provides interesting insights into the labor movement, feminism, and the struggle for civil rights. This work will be a worthy addition to a public library's American history collection. Jay Freeman


Choice, R.N. Seidel, January 1999
In this important book, a season historian argues--as have others--that "the universalities of our common culture have been constructed on the basis of difference and on the exclusion of considerable numbers of Americas from their benefits."...The ambitious project is consistent with Foner's previous scholarly accomplishments, many of them on the Civil War era, Reconstruction, and paradoxes of civil rights. It will likely become another focus of serious attention both in the search for a new interpretive consensus about the American past and in the occasionally harsh and ideologically colored discourse on the subject.


Portland Oregonian, John Strawn, 25 October 1998
Measured and penetrating, it's a comprehensive narrative of the central themes of our political past.


San Antonio Express-News, Maury Maverick, 6 December 1998
I urge you to but the just-published book "The Story of American Freedom" by Eric Foner....[A]n outstanding history of the march of freedom in America, especially by black people.


The Reader's Catalogue, Francois Furstenberg, Winter 1999
Foner has written a remarkably rich and complex book, one that synthesizes a generation of historical scholarship while offering a new approach to the old question "What is an American?"


Newsday, Herbert Mitgang, 1 November 1998
It's a masterful book that restores forgotten idealism to the current Washington scene....[A] highly original work that covers two centuries of courage, violence, achievement and unfulfilled dreams in the quest for liberty.


Book Description
From the Revolution to our own time, freedom has been America's strongest cultural bond and its most perilous fault line, a birthright for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. Eric Foner takes freedom not as a timeless truth but as a value whose meaning and scope have been contested throughout American history. His sweeping narrative shows freedom to have been shaped not only in congressional debates and political treatises but also on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms. His characters include the well-known--Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan--and the anonymous--former slaves, union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights advocates. In the end he gives us a stirring history of America itself focused on its animating impulse: freedom.


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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Over the course of our history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story is not the simple unfolding of a timeless truth, but an openended history of accomplishment and failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations and sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated and anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its meaning is shaped not only in Congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms. Its cast of characters ranges from Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, from former slaves seeking to breathe real meaning into emancipation to the union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights advocates of our time.

SYNOPSIS

The constant struggle for the right of liberty, preserved by the Declaration of Independence, is examined in this book. Its proponents include such diverse figures as Margaret Sanger and Thomas Jefferson.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert Ferrell - National Review

Foner's book...approaches brilliance in relating the efforts of many Americans to advance freedom for everyone, of others to advance it for themselves.

Erin Middlewood - The Progressive

...[H]e shows why making sense of the West is so difficult....[H]e doesn't try to smooth the rough terrain. Instead, he explores the contours and contradictins of the ...states....He's not shy of interpretation or or deflating legends. But he leaves his vision of the future wide open.

Harvey J. Kaye - The Progressive

This is not a philosophical book on freedom....[The book] reminds us that in every age Americans have risen...to contest the established limits to freedom and to redeem the nation's prophetic memory of liberty, equality, and democracy.

KLIATT

"Today, when asked to choose between freedom and equality, three quarters of Americans give priority to freedom." This little survey appears early in Foner's introduction and it is the foundation of his story about how elusive, misunderstood, misrepresented, and how perverted the concept and meaning of freedom is today for most Americans. In a country that was "born of liberty" in the breach of a bloody revolutionary war, most Americans were anything but free. The enslavement of Africans, the oppression of American Indians, the subjugation of women and the inhumane conditions under which Americans labored mocked the very idea of liberty for two-thirds of the adult American population. Until equality and freedom were inextricably linked in our political philosophy, freedom could not begin to fulfill the promise of democratic ideals in the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights. Foner charts the 200-year evolution of freedom in America when, in the beginning, only white males who owned property achieved "the social preconditions to freedom." Not until the age of Jackson (1837) were these rights extended to "ALL white males, [but] "for everyone else, it took a lot longer." Foner relates the development of freedom to America's great social movements; freedoms derived from the contract (labor), the Progressives, the sixties, the Cold War and in 1980, "conservative freedom" when Ronald Reagan "transformed the public discourse [by] rewriting history to erase non-conservative meanings of freedom, insisting that Americans from the beginning had been concerned only with freedom from,' specifically from the evils of repressive government and never with freedom to." With Supreme Court nominee RobertBork urging Americans to repudiate "our modern, virtually unqualified enthusiasm for liberty," and the astonishing proposal at the 1996 Republican National Convention to rescind the 14th Amendment principal of birthright citizenship, Foner has good reason to be concerned. He fears that Americans are eroding their cherished freedoms as they retreat into a crude insularity that defines freedom as "little more than to be left alone." This book is a celebration and a warning for all who wish to understand democracy and our unique brand of American liberty. All that one can hope for in the future is that "the better angels of our nature will reclaim their place in the forever unfinished story of American Freedom." KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 1998, Norton, 422p, 21cm, 98-3290, $15.95. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: William Kircher; Washington, DC, July 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 4)

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