The Story of American Freedom.

• Author: Kaye, Harvey J.
• Position: Review

The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner W.W. Norton. 422 pages. $27.95.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a fresh generation entered the history profession, eager to rewrite the past from the bottom up. Inspired by the movements of the day, we set out to redeem the struggles that had reconstituted the nation. Not only did we aspire to refashion historical studies, we also wanted to craft a new synthesis of American experience and a popular, radical-democratic understanding of the nation's history.

Although we managed to change history departments across the country, we failed to propound a new progressive grand narrative of American history. (Some postmodernists and multiculturalists oppose even trying to do so.)

Nevertheless, many of us refuse to abandon the effort. Prominent among our ranks is Eric Foner. Distinguished professor at Columbia University, former president of the Organization of American Historians, and author of many works, including the award-winning Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, Foner is recognized as one of America's foremost historical scholars. His new book represents a major contribution to democratic historiography.

Laid out in thirteen chapters, The Story of American Freedom recounts the tortuous yet progressive journey from the Revolution to the present. Foner does not tell his story in terms of an unfolding evolutionary process or an incessant march forward. According to him, "freedom" is still at the heart of American experience because Americans fight continuously about its meaning and its implications.

"The meaning of freedom has been constructed not only in Congressional debates and political treatises but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms," writes Foner, who includes politicians, publicists, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, artists, radicals, slaves, farmers, and workers among his protagonists. He articulates the ways that working people, minorities (in particular, African-Americans), and women have taken on the prevailing idea of freedom and advanced ever more democratic conceptions of it. And he records how rebellious working people, encouraged by the words of revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, transformed English ideas of freedom and extended the boundaries of the new American political nation well beyond the ambitions of the propertied elites.

But Foner also attends to disappointments, even tragedies: "The Revolution inspired widespread hopes that slavery could be...