Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideals

America: A Cultural History #3

by David Hackett Fischer

This book studies American ideas of liberty and freedom as visions of an open society, through the symbols they have inspired from the Revolutionary era through 9/11. Before 1776, a variety of icons appeared throughout the colonies: New England's Liberty Trees, New York's Liberty Poles, Pennsylvania's Liberty Bells, South Carolina's Liberty Crescents, and backcountry rattlesnakes that warned "Don't tread on me." After independence, the search for a common vision inspired new symbols with other meanings: the eagle, the flag, Yankee Doodle, Uncle Sam, Brother Jonathan, and Miss Liberty.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, American, Politics, Philosophy, American Revolution

851 pages, Hardcover

First published October 18, 2004

About the author

David Hackett Fischer is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University and one of America’s most influential historians. His work spans cultural history, economics, and narrative nonfiction, with major titles including Albion’s Seed, The Great Wave, Paul Revere’s Ride, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington’s Crossing. Educated at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, Fischer has combined scholarly depth with accessible storytelling throughout his career. His Champlain’s Dream further showcased his skill for biographical history, earning international recognition. Honored with the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, he is celebrated for both his groundbreaking research and his dedication to teaching.

Reviews

[Sarah Milne · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars would be more appropriate. I love David Hackett Fischer (my graduate adviser had him on her committee when she got her degree, so I like to claim him as a sort of grandfather in the field, as presumptuous as that is.) I really love what he did here. Using images, he reconstructed the conceptual history of the terms liberty and freedom. This is a book that could easily have been four times its size, weighty though already it is. It is also a beautiful book, in full color and composed of many small sections. Not everyone will agree with his conclusions, but his logic is sound and very thought provoking. I would have liked for him to cover more of the later 1800s, particularly the turn of the century, which he pretty much skipped over. I also wish that he could add on to the book given the events of the past five years (since it was published.) All in all, a great framework for an understanding of the symbols and ideologies of America, past and present.

Finally, a quote:

“What keeps American free is the diversity of its traditions of liberty and freedom. The tensions and contradictions in this heritage have inspired new visions of liberty and freedom and a great fertility of thought. The strength of this open system is its infinite variety. The gravest dangers to our free society are born-again apostles of one particular liberty and freedom who are incapable of imagining any way except their own. The greatest hope is that we have so many of these people, and their beliefs are so diverse.
“If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom. Many single-minded apostles of a narrow idea of a free society have become tyrants in their turn.” (722-723)

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book in the four book (projected) that Fischer began with the seminal "Albion's Seed".

Liberty and Freedom is devoted to those two concepts, which Fischer holds are key to understanding the culture of America. Fischer uses quilts, flags, photos, paintings, sculpture and pretty much anything else under the sun(toilet decorated with a bald eagle, anyone?) to illustrate this thesis.

Clearly, Fischer is concerned with the idea of America. What is most novel about this book is the way that Fischer tries to assimilate some of the newer teachings of social history with the the method of traditional history(focus on military events/political leaders).

Never one to shy away from histiographical concerns, Fischer illustrates these varying approaches in a short appendix.

This book is of high quality, copiously illustrated and is published in conjunction with a touring museum exhibition that is travelling as far west as St. Louis (as a Californian, I am a little upset that it isn't coming out farther).

The chapters of the book are short to the point of being anecdotal: two pages on Emerson, four pages on Thoreau, three pages on Martin Luther King. However, that is in line with Fischer's central concern which is to document the imagery of the ideas of liberty and freedom in American history.

The heavier intellectual lifting is towards the front of the book. In the first hundred pages, Fischer produces a nifty chart that documents the differing origins of the concepts of liberty and freedom (Did you know that liberty derives from the Roman republic/empire whereas Freedom comes from Germanic/Anglo tribal roots?). He then relates these concepts to the cultural groups that settled America (and to which Albion's seed is entirely devoted).

While it is possible to quibble with the result, I will save that for the real historians. Suffice it to say, this book is an awesome achievment, and Fischer is once again to be commended, not only for his attempts to bravely reconsile two competing schools of history, but also for his large spirited message, that groups which turn away from the concepts of liberty and freedom ultimately lose the battle in America's "marketplace of ideas."

A must for cynics and believers alike.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

Fischer, author of Washington's Crossing (**** May/June 2004) and Albion's Seed, offers Liberty and Freedom as part of a four-volume history of American culture. Focusing on material culture rather than philosophical texts, he argues that we pass down ideas about liberty and freedom from one generation to the next, altering them as some groups simultaneously struggle against forms of repression. Fischer's stories span well-known anecdotes about Betsy Ross, Frederick Douglass, and Jimi Hendrix to near-forgotten tales about the meaning of the Alabama flag's rattlesnake banner of liberty. Although interesting, the sprawling narrative often fails to coalesce into a broader argument. In addition, while Fischer exhaustively explores older symbols, he doesn't delve as deeply into present-day icons (such as the gay liberation rainbow). Nonetheless, Liberty and Freedom is an important visual survey of where we've been__and possibly where we're headed.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Debbie Morehouse]

While this was probably not the intention of the author, I found this book to be illuminating about the trials and tribulations of past generations. We have had it so easy, even in these "unprecedented" times.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strong start discussing the ideas and symbols of freedom at the time of the Revolution. Very interesting discussion of the expansion of these ideas and the images used to represent them throughout US history. Some of the ideas in the last sections seem a bit stretched to make his points, but that doesn’t detract from the very long book as a whole.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book describes the little-understood distinction between the words freedom and liberty. An understanding of these concepts is relevant to politics of today.

"In ancient Rome, liberty implied inequality. People were granted different liberties according to their condition. Some had many liberties. Others had few or none. When Rome was a republic, its citizens possessed the liberty of government by assembly, but in different ways according to their rank. Magistrates and senators had liberty to speak. Citizens had liberty to listen and vote. Servi had liberty to look on, but they could neither speak nor listen nor vote."

"The free Norse families carried into a new world their ancient folkways of freedom, which they understood as a complex set of rights and responsibilities. For them, freedom meant the rule of law, the power to choose one's own chief, and the right to be governed and judged by a local assembly called the Thing. The Thing was a gathering of free men, who in early years carried weapons to the assembly and voted by 'striking their shields or rattling their spears,' in what was called the Vapnatak in Old Norse, Wapentake of Old English, and Wappans chawing of Old Scots. A person who was born to freedom in an ancient tribe had a sacred obligation to serve and support the folk, and to keep the customs of a free people, and to respect the rights of others on pain of banishment."

"The freeborn people of northern Europe were alike in their birthright of freedom, however disparate they may have been in power, wealth, or rank. In one of the oldest lays of England the hero sings, 'Lithe and listen, gentlemen, that be of Freborn blood!' Among 'folkfree' people, freedom created an element of equality in the face of other inequalities."

"Freeborn people in northern Europe had possessions that are called rights in English, or rechte in German. These words began as adjectives that meant straight, sound, correct, or good. They became nouns for specific entitlements that could be claimed as a matter of obligation, and also for the general idea of entitlement. Ancient Mediterranean languages had no exact equivalent for rights. In archaic Greek, early references to eleutheria referred not to rights but to an idea of 'authorized concessions.' A careful student of this subject observes that libertas in Rome was 'not an innate faculty or right of man' but the sum of liberties that had been 'granted by the laws of Rome.'"

"Every Western language has words such as liberty or freedom, but only one language employs them both in common speech. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian cultures have freedom but not liberty. Spanish, French, and Italian have liberty but not freedom. Philosopher Hannah Pitkin writes, 'Speakers of English have a unique opportunity: they get to choose between 'liberty' and 'freedom.' No other European language, ancient or modern, offers such a choice.' This heritage of English speaking people has created a distinctive dynamism in their thought about liberty and freedom."

[Arianne X · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Personification and Deification of Liberty

A wonderful source book for understanding the iconography of Liberty, but have a magnifying glass ready. This book is indeed unique with many hard to find prints and full color depictions.

However, this book is not intended as a purely academic or philosophical treatment of the subjects of liberty or freedom. Nor is this strictly a work of political theory. It is more, it is a source book depicting the manner in which these concepts have appeared and changed in the popular imagination of the America people over time; since before the American War of Independence through the tragic events of 9/11 and how the fragmented iconography of liberty coalesced around the symbols we recognize today.

However, the material in this book does imply some philosophical questions. For example, what is the relation between the inheritance of the European philosophical tradition and the founding of America? What does America mean as philosophical event? We can see such a relationship tangentially implied or embedded in so much of the material included in the this book. America, as something new in the world, is also an inheritance from the European philosophical tradition. America is a hybrid ensemble of traditions and inheritances which compose the essential roots of American cultural identity. American philosophy then becomes rooted in the experiences of immigration and emancipation just to name one quintessentially American dichotomy. America is the experience of disjunction, utopia and dystopia, a double unreality in so many ways and yet also a new hyper-reality in the world as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it. For those outside of America, it is both an idea and a reality, it is real and yet mythical. Some of this is very apparent in the very interesting and helpful discussions of two the most quintessential American 'Romantic', often referred to as transcendentalist, philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau.

There is great enjoyment to be found here in studying the prints and reading the captions, just have that magnifying glass handy.

[Derek Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a let down after Albion's Seed. Fischer tries to argue that liberty and freedom are folk traditions, but he does not provide enough concrete examples to let us know exactly what that means. Instead, he runs through (often entertainingly) the high points in American history and describes how each corresponds to freedom (belonging to a community of free people) or liberty (being independent from the will of another).

[Cj]

Very thoughtful read on how the American colonies viewed the concepts of freedom, and how the choose to express these views. I like the insight into what the American revolutionaries were thinking about.

[Bob Gustafson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book starts off excellently, by explaining what liberty and freedom are and what separates them. The book is really about U.S. iconography through the decades and the concepts of freedom and liberty sort of get forgotten about. Nevertheless it earns the four stars for what it does well.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book discusses the cultural differences in the meaning of liberty and freedom.

[joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting approach to an abstract historical subject - the depiction of freedom and liberty through American History.