Eric Foner – Give me Liberty. An American History (Third edition)

Автор: Eric Foner
Название книги: Give me Liberty. An American History (Third edition)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Америки, Австралии, Океании
Страницы: 1389
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Give Me Liberty! An American History is a survey of American history
from the earliest days of European exploration and conquest
of the New World to the first years of the twenty-first century. It
offers students a clear, concise narrative whose central theme is
the changing contours of American freedom.
I am extremely gratified by the response to the first two editions of
Give Me Liberty!, which have been used in survey courses at many
hundreds of two- and four-year colleges and universities throughout
the country. The comments I have received from instructors and students
encourage me to think that GiveMe Liberty! has worked well in
their classrooms. Their comments have also included many valuable
suggestions for revisions, which I greatly appreciate. These have
ranged from corrections of typographical and factual errors to
thoughts about subjects that needed more extensive treatment. In
making revisions for this Third Edition, I have tried to take these suggestions
into account. I have also incorporated the findings and
insights of new scholarship that has appeared since the original edition
was written.
The most significant changes in this Third Edition reflectmy desire
to place American history more fully in a global context. The book
remains, of course, a survey of American, notworld, history. But in the
past few years, scholars writing about the American past have sought
to delineate the connections and influences of theUnited States on the
rest of the world as well as the global developments that have helped
to shape the course of events here at home. They have also devoted
greater attention to transnational processes—the expansion of
empires, international labor migrations, the rise and fall of slavery, the
globalization of economic enterprise—that cannot be understood
solely within the confines of one country’s national boundaries.
Without in any way seeking to homogenize the history of individual
nations or neglect the domestic forces that have shaped American
development, the Third Edition reflects this recent emphasis in
American historical writing. Small changes relating to this theme
may be found throughout the book. The major additions seeking to
illuminate the global context of American history are as follows:
Chapter 4 includes a brief discussion of how the Great Awakening
in the American colonies took place at a time of growing religious fundamentalism in many parts of the world. Chapter 5 now devotes attention
to the global impact of the American Declaration of Independence, including
how both colonial peoples seeking national independence and groups who felt
themselves deprived of equal rights seized upon the Declaration’s language to
promote their own causes. Chapter 8 discusses how the slave revolution in
Saint Domingue, which established the black republic of Haiti, affected the
thinking of both black and white Americans in the early 1800s. The chapter
also contains a new section on the Barbary Wars, the first armed encounter
between the United States and Islamic states.
In Chapter 10, I have added a new section discussing the response in the
United States to the Latin American wars of independence of the early nineteenth
century, and the similarities and differences between these struggles
and our own War of Independence. Chapter 11 contains a new section discussing
the abolition of slavery elsewhere in theWesternHemisphere and how
the aftermath of emancipation in other areas affected the debate over slavery
in the United States. Chapter 13 compares the California gold rush with the
consequences of the discovery of gold in Australia at the same time, and also
adds a discussion of the “opening” of Japan to American commerce in the
1850s. And in Chapter 14, I added to the discussion of the CivilWar a comparison
of its destructiveness with that of other conflicts of the era, and also an
examination of how the consolidation of national power in the United States
reflected a worldwide process underway at the same time in other countries. In
that chapter, too, reflecting the findings of recent scholarship, there are new
discussions of the war’s impact on American religion and on Native
Americans. Chapter 15, dealing with the era of Reconstruction, now compares
the aftermath of slavery in the United States with the outcome in other places
where the institution was abolished.
In Chapter 16, a new section places the westward movement in the United
States in the context of the settlement of frontier regions of other countries,
ranging from Argentina to Australia and South Africa, and discusses the consequences
for native populations in these societies. Chapter 17 expands on
the acquisition by the United States of an overseas empire as a result of the
Spanish-AmericanWar, and includes a new section on the Global Color Line—
the worldwide development of national policies intended to guarantee white
supremacy. I have strengthened, in Chapter 19, the discussion of the aftermath
of World War I by examining the impact around the world of President
Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric concerning national self-determination, and the
disappointment felt when the principle was not applied to the Asian and
African colonies of European empires. Chapter 22 now includes a section on
black internationalism—howWorldWar II led many black Americans to identify
their campaign for equal rights with the struggle for national independence
of colonial peoples in other parts of the world. In Chapter 23, I have
expanded the discussion of the idea of human rights to indicate some of the
ambiguities of the concept as it emerged as a major theme of international
debate afterWorld War II. There is a new section in Chapter 24 on the global
reaction to American racial segregation and to the stirrings in the 1950s of the
civil rights movement. I have strengthened the treatment of the 1960s by
adding a discussion of the global 1968—how events in theUnited States in that
volatile year occurred at the same time as uprisings of young people in many
other parts of the world. And in Chapter 28, the book’s final chapter, I have significantly expanded
coverage of the last few years of American history, including the election of
Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, the continuing
controversy over the relationship between liberty and security in the context
of a global war on terror, and the global economic crisis that began in 2008.
As in the Second Edition, the Voices of Freedom sections in each chapter
now include two documents; I have changed a number of them to reflect the
new emphasis on the global context of American history. I have also revised
the end-of-chapter bibliographies to reflect current scholarship. And I now
include references to websites that contain digital images and documents relating
to the chapter themes.
This Third Edition also introduces some new features. Visions of Freedom, a
parallel to the Voices of Freedom document excerpts that have proven useful to
instructors and students, highlights in each chapter an image that illuminates
an understanding of freedom. I believe that examining this theme through
visual as well as written evidence helps students to appreciate how our concepts
of freedom have changed over the course of American history. The
Visions of Freedom feature includes a headnote and questions that encourage
students to think critically about the images.
The pedagogy in the book has been revised and enhanced to give students
more guidance as they move through chapters. The end-of-chapter review
pages have been expanded with additional review questions, many more key
terms with page references, and a new set of questions on the freedom theme.
The aim of the pedagogy, as always, is to offer students guidance through the
material without getting in the way of the presentation.
I have also added new images in each chapter to expand the visual representation
of key ideas and personalities in the text. Taken together, I believe these
changes enhance the purpose of GiveMe Liberty! : to offer students a clear, concise,
and thematically enriched introduction to American history.
Americans have always had a divided attitude toward history. On the one hand,
they tend to be remarkably future-oriented, dismissing events of even the
recent past as “ancient history” and sometimes seeing history as a burden to be
overcome, a prison from which to escape. On the other hand, like many other
peoples, Americans have always looked to history for a sense of personal or
group identity and of national cohesiveness. This is why so many Americans
devote time and energy to tracing their family trees and why they visit historical
museums and National Park Service historical sites in ever-increasing
numbers. My hope is that this book will convince readers with all degrees of
interest that history does matter to them.
The novelist and essayist James Baldwin once observed that history “does
not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great
force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, . . . [that] history
is literally present in all that we do.” As Baldwin recognized, the force of history
is evident in our own world. Especially in a political democracy like the United
States, whose government is designed to rest on the consent of informed
citizens, knowledge of the past is essential—not only for those of us whose
profession is the teaching and writing of history, but for everyone. History, to
be sure, does not offer simple lessons or immediate answers to current questions.
Knowing the history of immigration to the United States, and all of the tensions, turmoil, and aspirations associated with it, for example, does not tell
us what current immigration policy ought to be. But without that knowledge,
we have no way of understanding which approaches have worked and which
have not—essential information for the formulation of future public policy.
History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the
past. Rather than a fixed collection of facts, or a group of interpretations that
cannot be challenged, our understanding of history is constantly changing.
There is nothing unusual in the fact that each generation rewrites history to
meet its own needs, or that scholars disagree among themselves on basic questions
like the causes of the CivilWar or the reasons for the Great Depression.
Precisely because each generation asks different questions of the past, each
generation formulates different answers. The past thirty years have witnessed
a remarkable expansion of the scope of historical study. The experiences of
groups neglected by earlier scholars, including women, African-Americans,
working people, and others, have received unprecedented attention from historians.
New subfields—social history, cultural history, and family history
among them—have taken their place alongside traditional political and diplomatic
history.
GiveMe Liberty! draws on this voluminous historical literature to present an
up-to-date and inclusive account of the American past, paying due attention to
the experience of diverse groups of Americans while in no way neglecting the
events and processes Americans have experienced in common. It devotes serious
attention to political, social, cultural, and economic history, and to their
interconnections. The narrative brings together major events and prominent
leaders with the many groups of ordinary people who make up American society.
Give Me Liberty! has a rich cast of characters, from Thomas Jefferson
to campaigners for woman suffrage, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to former
slaves seeking to breathe meaning into emancipation during and after the
CivilWar.
Aimed at an audience of undergraduate students with little or no detailed
knowledge of American history, Give Me Liberty! guides readers through the
complexities of the subject without overwhelming them with excessive detail.
The unifying theme of freedom that runs through the text gives shape to the
narrative and integrates the numerous strands that make up the American
experience. This approach builds on that of my earlier book, The Story of
American Freedom (1998), although GiveMe Liberty! places events and personalities
in the foreground and is more geared to the structure of the introductory
survey course.
Freedom, and the battles to define its meaning, has long been central to my
own scholarship and undergraduate teaching, which focuses on the nineteenth
century and especially the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction
(1850–1877). This was a time when the future of slavery tore the nation apart
and emancipation produced a national debate over what rights the former
slaves, and all Americans, should enjoy as free citizens. I have found that attention
to clashing definitions of freedom and the struggles of different groups to
achieve freedom as they understood it offers a way of making sense of the bitter
battles and vast transformations of that pivotal era. I believe that the same
is true for American history as a whole.
No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals
and as a nation than freedom. The central term in our political language,
freedom—or liberty, with which it is almost always used interchangeably—is deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life.
The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind’s inalienable
rights; the Constitution announces its purpose as securing liberty’s blessings.
The United States fought the CivilWar to bring about a new birth of freedom,
World War II for the Four Freedoms, and the Cold War to defend the Free
World. Americans’ love of liberty has been represented by liberty poles, liberty
caps, and statues of liberty, and acted out by burning stamps and burning draft
cards, by running away from slavery, and by demonstrating for the right to
vote. “Every man in the street, white, black, red, or yellow,” wrote the educator
and statesman Ralph Bunche in 1940, “knows that this is ‘the land of the
free’ . . . ‘the cradle of liberty.’”
The very universality of the idea of freedom, however, can be misleading.
Freedom is not a fixed, timeless category with a single unchanging definition.
Indeed, the history of the United States is, in part, a story of debates, disagreements,
and struggles over freedom. Crises like the American Revolution, the
Civil War, and the Cold War have permanently transformed the idea of freedom.
So too have demands by various groups of Americans to enjoy greater
freedom. The meaning of freedom has been constructed not only in congressional
debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in
parlors and even bedrooms.
Over the course of our history, American freedom has been both a reality
and a mythic ideal—a living truth for millions of Americans, a cruel mockery
for others. For some, freedom has been what some scholars call a “habit of the
heart,” an ideal so taken for granted that it is lived out but rarely analyzed. For
others, freedom is not a birthright but a distant goal that has inspired great
sacrifice.
Give Me Liberty! draws attention to three dimensions of freedom that have
been critical in American history: (1) the meanings of freedom; (2) the social conditions
that make freedom possible; and (3) the boundaries of freedom that determine
who is entitled to enjoy freedom and who is not. All have changed over
time.
In the era of the American Revolution, for example, freedom was primarily
a set of rights enjoyed in public activity—the right of a community to be governed
by laws to which its representatives had consented and of individuals to
engage in religious worship without governmental interference. In the nineteenth
century, freedom came to be closely identified with each person’s opportunity
to develop to the fullest his or her innate talents. In the twentieth, the
“ability to choose,” in both public and private life, became perhaps the dominant
understanding of freedom. This development was encouraged by the
explosive growth of the consumer marketplace (a development that receives
considerable attention in Give Me Liberty!), which offered Americans an
unprecedented array of goods with which to satisfy their needs and desires.
During the 1960s, a crucial chapter in the history of American freedom, the
idea of personal freedom was extended into virtually every realm, from attire
and “lifestyle” to relations between the sexes. Thus, over time, more and more
areas of life have been drawn into Americans’ debates about the meaning of
freedom.
A second important dimension of freedom focuses on the social conditions
necessary to allow freedom to flourish. What kinds of economic institutions
and relationships best encourage individual freedom? In the colonial era and
for more than a century after independence, the answer centered on economic autonomy, enshrined in the glorification of the independent small producer—
the farmer, skilled craftsman, or shopkeeper—who did not have to depend on
another person for his livelihood. As the industrial economy matured, new
conceptions of economic freedom came to the fore: “liberty of contract” in the
Gilded Age, “industrial freedom” (a say in corporate decision-making) in the
Progressive era, economic security during the New Deal, and, more recently,
the ability to enjoy mass consumption within a market economy.
The boundaries of freedom, the third dimension of this theme, have inspired
some of the most intense struggles in American history. Although founded on
the premise that liberty is an entitlement of all humanity, the United States for
much of its history deprived many of its own people of freedom. Non-whites
have rarely enjoyed the same access to freedom as white Americans. The belief
in equal opportunity as the birthright of all Americans has coexisted with persistent
efforts to limit freedom by race, gender, class, and in other ways.
Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that one person’s freedom has frequently
been linked to another’s servitude. In the colonial era and nineteenth century,
expanding freedom for many Americans rested on the lack of freedom—
slavery, indentured servitude, the subordinate position of women—for others.
By the same token, it has been through battles at the boundaries—the efforts
of racial minorities, women, and others to secure greater freedom—that the
meaning and experience of freedom have been deepened and the concept
extended into new realms.
Time and again in American history, freedom has been transformed by the
demands of excluded groups for inclusion. The idea of freedom as a universal
birthright owes much both to abolitionists who sought to extend the blessings
of liberty to blacks and to immigrant groups who insisted on full recognition
as American citizens. The principle of equal protection of the law without
regard to race, which became a central element of American freedom, arose
from the antislavery struggle and the Civil War and was reinvigorated by the
civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which called itself the “freedom movement.”
The battle for the right of free speech by labor radicals and birth control
advocates in the first part of the twentieth century helped to make civil liberties
an essential element of freedom for all Americans.
Although concentrating on events within the United States, GiveMe Liberty!
also, as indicated above, situates American history in the context of developments
in other parts of theworld.Many of the forces that shaped American history,
including the international migration of peoples, the development of
slavery, the spread of democracy, and the expansion of capitalism, were worldwide
processes not confined to the United States. Today, American ideas, culture,
and economic and military power exert unprecedented influence
throughout the world. But beginning with the earliest days of settlement,
when European empires competed to colonize North America and enrich
themselves from its trade, American history cannot be understood in isolation
from its global setting.
Freedom is the oldest of clichés and the most modern of aspirations. At various
times in our history, it has served as the rallying cry of the powerless and
as a justification of the status quo. Freedom helps to bind our culture together
and exposes the contradictions between what America claims to be and what
it sometimes has been. American history is not a narrative of continual
progress toward greater and greater freedom. As the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted after the Civil War, “revolutions may go backward.”
Though freedom can be achieved, it may also be taken away. This happened,
for example, when the equal rights granted to former slaves
immediately after the CivilWar were essentially nullified during the era of segregation.
As was said in the eighteenth century, the price of freedom is eternal
vigilance.
In the early twenty-first century, freedom continues to play a central role in
American political and social life and thought. It is invoked by individuals and
groups of all kinds, from critics of economic globalization to those who seek to
secure American freedom at home and export it abroad. I hope that Give Me
Liberty! will offer beginning students a clear account of the course of American
history, and of its central theme, freedom, which today remains as varied, contentious,
and ever-changing as America itself.