The Story of American Freedom

The Story of American Freedom is a 1998 historical nonfiction book by famed American historian Eric Foner. The book chronicles how the American values of freedom and liberty have been applied during various periods, from the American Revolution to the rebirth of conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s. Foner’s work is essentially a history of freedom in the United States, but it focuses primarily on how the concept of freedom has been limited, contested, and expanded throughout the nation’s history. Foner establishes three primary themes in his work: the meanings of freedom, the social conditions that make freedom possible, and the boundaries of freedom. Published by W.W. Norton & Company Inc., The Story of American Freedom was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998.

Across 13 chapters, Foner establishes the idea that American freedom has been a contested concept rather than a fixed definition or a predetermined belief. The earliest ideas of American freedom were those derived from British liberty dictating a strict obedience to law and the puritanical notion that freedom was a spiritual condition rather than a political one. Freedom became democratized with the Revolution, but it was a contradictory concept because of the compromises placed in the Constitution that assured the existence of slavery for decades to come. Slavery is the primary focus throughout the first section of the book, as Foner examines how the language of freedom and liberty used during the Revolution was taken up by enslaved people and abolitionists to call for emancipation. The competing visions of free labor, or wage labor, in the North and slave labor in the South shifted the meaning of freedom in the years leading to the Civil War.

In the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and the years surrounding World War I, the meaning of freedom shifted once again to take on a strong economic element. In the middle chapters of the book, Foner examines the battles between labor and employers that arose over issues concerning workers’ rights and laissez-faire capitalism. The eras of the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, and the turbulent 1960s redrew the boundaries of freedom, but the changes required the role of an activist federal government. Whereas freedom of the 1960s meant removing limitations and boundaries, the rebirth of conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s showed that it can also mean the opposite. Foner’s history of freedom provides the context for the social and political movements that have taken place and the crises that have been overcome throughout American history.