From Publishers Weekly
English-speaking people have distinct words for the concepts of freedom and liberty. But that doesn't mean everyone agrees on what they mean, as Fischer (author of the bestselling Washington's Crossing) reveals in this exhaustive study of how the two have been defined in words and images from colonial times to the present. Short chapters supply the backstories of familiar symbols like the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam, and also reintroduce forgotten figures like Brother Jonathan, an early 19th-century representation of America as a country bumpkin that was popular in Europe. In a precursor to today's "salad bowl" image of cultural diversity, artists of the Revolutionary era portrayed America as "a flight of birds, a flock of sheep, even a kettle of fish." As the modern age approaches, photography becomes increasingly important, as seen in a triptych of riveting images from the Civil Rights movement. But the record also becomes somewhat muddled, Fischer finds, with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix appearing as images on nearly equal footing with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. In the end, the oversize, beautifully illustrated book shifts subtly from a rich graphic survey, incorporating painting, flags and sculpture, to a broader chronicle of the many ways Americans have articulated their most cherished ideals. Over 400 illus., 250 in color. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In 1774, a committee established by the Continental Congress approved a design for a new seal, meant to give the nascent American cause symbolic and visual form. The design was a hodgepodge of signs that had been floating around during the last years of British rule: a marble column topped by a liberty cap resting on a copy of the Magna Carta, supported by 13 hands reaching in from the sides. The hands suggested unity, the Magna Carta recalled the tradition of limiting the sovereign's absolute rights, and the liberty cap, or pileus, was a classical reference to the rituals of freeing slaves from bondage. The elements all had good pedigree and clear meanings, but something went wrong in the execution. A soft-pointed liberty cap atop an upright marble column produced an image so clearly phallic that it brings a blush to the cheeks even today.The seal of 1774 hasn't lasted; nor, for that matter, has the liberty cap, which was all the rage in the 18th century but is recognized today only by dutiful students of iconography. Recovering such details, and placing them in context, is the successful aim of David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom. Fischer's new book is the third in a series he is devoting to the cultural history of the United States (volume two is still in the works). It follows and builds on the central thesis of the first volume, Albion's Seed: that the early United States was the product of four great migrations from the British Isles -- Puritans, Royalists, Quakers and hardscrabble types from Ireland and the Scottish borderlands. Fischer doesn't reargue that bold claim, but he does rely on these distinctions to organize the sprawling contents of the new work.And it does sprawl. At 851 pages, Liberty and Freedom is a big book, and a very loose-jointed one. The words "another," "also" and "others" recur again and again at the openings of Fischer's chapters, a rhetorical concession to a topic so huge that no single narrative or theme can really contain it. "The North also searched for emblems of its sacred cause," reads a typical transition, from a chapter that covers the Confederate flag and an anti-Union spittoon used in the South, to a chapter featuring an eagle named Old Abe who was used as a live mascot by a Union regiment from Wisconsin. The story of Old Abe's sad demise (in a fire years after the Civil War ended) is one of the book's many captivating digressions.Even Fischer's title, and his brief effort to sketch a broader argument about liberty and freedom, don't give the contents much overarching unity. He argues that liberty and freedom were distinctly different understandings of the American project and that we have, throughout history, vacillated between conceiving our national ideal in limited, legalistic ways and more organic, responsible ones. Liberty, he writes, is built on the idea of being free from restraint, with what we think of today as rights conceived of more as privileges, granted and protected by the state. Liberty is a fundamentally Roman and usually hierarchical concept. Freedom, on the other hand, was derived from northern Europe and based on a more communal sense of equal rights and responsibility among all people. The two concepts are often used synonymously, Fischer acknowledges. "But ancient differences between liberty and freedom were not so easily erased," he argues. Occasionally, as in the images and ideals of liberty championed by Tory elites and loyalists, or the reciprocal rights championed by the Quakers, he can find the concepts clearly differentiated. But most of the time, they are intermingled or indistinct.Despite this, and despite Fischer's reliance on the questionable idea of a collective memory or "folkways" that transmit symbolic meanings down through the ages, the book is endlessly entertaining. It offers the author a chance to fact-check and retell some of the great stories of American history (Francis Scott Key and "The Star-Spangled Banner," Betsy Ross and the flag) and dredge up icons that have been sadly forgotten. Among these is Brother Jonathan, a personification of the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries in the same vein as the British John Bull, or Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. Brother Jonathan was a bumptious sort who morphed, over time, into a figure of violence, hypocrisy (during the slavery debate) and nationalist myopia. To critics outside America, he was a nasty character and an apt representation of U.S. foreign policy. Inside this country, the author argues, he lost currency after the Civil War, in part because of increasing urbanization. And yet, with many in the United States roundly criticizing this country for precisely the things that Brother Jonathan once stood for, why has this particular folkway run dry?There are, perhaps, larger conclusions to be drawn from the wealth of material Fischer has collected. It's interesting to see how little a role religious imagery plays. When religious meanings creep in, they tend to have a nasty edge: a satanic figure dictating the Emancipation Proclamation to Abraham Lincoln, or devil wings and horns drawn onto the image of the women's rights crusader Victoria Woodhull. It's also fascinating to note how vital a sense of grievance is to the perpetuation of a visual symbol. The Confederate flag survives because Southern resentment is still strong. Liberty trees and liberty poles, icons that emerged in Northern states during the Revolutionary era, have all but disappeared. In 2002, the U.S. Navy brought back the old "Don't Tread on Me" flag, with its angry serpent -- revivifying an old icon during a time of post-Sept. 11 anger.Fischer mostly avoids the temptation to make these larger kinds of conclusions. He is interested in local context, close reading and connecting threads. He calls the books in this series "braided narratives," and while there are times when the braid is very loose, there are hundreds of fascinating strands in this volume, each of them worth tugging at. Reviewed by Philip KennicottCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From 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. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Part of a series on the cultural history of America, this book focuses on the different manifestations of folk culture as they relate to the concept of liberty and freedom, from the American Revolution through the current war on terrorism. Fischer highlights the origins of our nation's evolving notions of liberty and freedom, focusing not only on leaders and events but also on ordinary citizens and the structure and processes that impact their lives. This work uses artifacts, images, and materials--from the Statue of Liberty to the Stars and Stripes--as culturally reflective of historical evidence upon which our society can be critiqued. The more than 400 images add to the historical narratives and stories that examine ideals of freedom from our idealized periods through our more controversial eras, including the Civil War, civil rights, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The story format makes his book particularly approachable as Fischer offers enormous breadth and depth of exploration of this theme that has defined much of American culture and politics. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Liberty and freedom: Americans agree that these values are fundamental to our nation, but what do they mean? How have their meanings changed through time? In this new volume of cultural history, David Hackett Fischer shows how these varying ideas form an intertwined strand that runs through the core of American life. Fischer examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture. Tocqueville called them "habits of the heart." From the earliest colonies, Americans have shared ideals of liberty and freedom, but with very different meanings. Like DNA these ideas have transformed and recombined in each generation. The book arose from Fischer's discovery that the words themselves had differing origins: the Latinate "liberty" implied separation and independence. The root meaning of "freedom" (akin to "friend") connoted attachment: the rights of belonging in a community of freepeople. The tension between the two senses has been a source of conflict and creativity throughout American history. Liberty & Freedom studies the folk history of those ideas through more than 400 visions, images, and symbols. It begins with the American Revolution, and explores the meaning of New England's Liberty Tree, Pennsylvania's Liberty Bells, Carolina's Liberty Crescent, and "Don't Tread on Me" rattlesnakes. In the new republic, the search for a common American symbol gave new meaning to Yankee Doodle, Uncle Sam, Miss Liberty, and many other icons. In the Civil War, Americans divided over liberty and freedom. Afterward, new universal visions were invented by people who had formerly been excluded from a free society--African Americans, American Indians, and immigrants. The twentieth century saw liberty and freedom tested by enemies and contested at home, yet it brought the greatest outpouring of new visions, from Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms to Martin Luther King's "dream" to Janis Joplin's "nothin' left to lose." Illustrated in full color with a rich variety of images, Liberty and Freedom is, literally, an eye-opening work of history--stimulating, large-spirited, and ultimately, inspiring.

FROM OUR EDITORS

David Hackett Fischer, the author of Washington's Crossing and Paul Revere's Ride, has written a penetrating history of America's founding ideals and how they have been understood from Colonial times to the present. Fischer, one of the most respected historians, uses visual images to demonstrate the different and sometimes opposing implications of "freedom" and "liberty." Instead of an abstract examination of arid concepts, he has produced a rich, stimulating book about ideas that still guide us.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Philip Kennicott - The Washington Post

[Fischer] calls the books in this series "braided narratives," and while there are times when the braid is very loose, there are hundreds of fascinating strands in this volume, each of them worth tugging at.

Publishers Weekly

English-speaking people have distinct words for the concepts of freedom and liberty. But that doesn't mean everyone agrees on what they mean, as Fischer (author of the bestselling Washington's Crossing) reveals in this exhaustive study of how the two have been defined in words and images from colonial times to the present. Short chapters supply the backstories of familiar symbols like the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam, and also reintroduce forgotten figures like Brother Jonathan, an early 19th-century representation of America as a country bumpkin that was popular in Europe. In a precursor to today's "salad bowl" image of cultural diversity, artists of the Revolutionary era portrayed America as "a flight of birds, a flock of sheep, even a kettle of fish." As the modern age approaches, photography becomes increasingly important, as seen in a triptych of riveting images from the Civil Rights movement. But the record also becomes somewhat muddled, Fischer finds, with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix appearing as images on nearly equal footing with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. In the end, the oversize, beautifully illustrated book shifts subtly from a rich graphic survey, incorporating painting, flags and sculpture, to a broader chronicle of the many ways Americans have articulated their most cherished ideals. Over 400 illus., 250 in color. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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