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

����� ��� David Hackett Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom is a museum exhibit catalog, an encyclopedia of the iconography of liberty and freedom, and a narrative of the multiple meanings of liberty and freedom in America from the arrival of the first Europeans to the present day. The book is a companion to the exhibit ‘‘American Visions of Liberty and Freedom,’’ which started at the Virginia Historical Society and which will eventually travel to Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Lexington, Massachusetts, and St. Louis. But the book is more than a museum catalog; it is the third volume of a planned series of four on which Fischer has been working for over two decades. Albion’s Seed was the first book in the series. The second and fourth volumes (not yet published) will examine the meeting of Africans and Europeans in America and the ‘‘cultural transformation’’ after the Revolution. Fischer describes the first and second volumes as ethnographic, the third as iconographic, and the fourth as quantitative with close attention to individual experience. These books are united by a set of common questions and the centrality of culture as an explanatory force. In Liberty and Freedom, Fischer builds upon his argument from Albion’s Seed to argue that just as British folkways persisted in America and contributed to the creation of distinctive regional cultures, there were multiple folk cultures of liberty and freedom and in many cases, these persist in America today. In his introduction, Fischer explores the etymology of liberty and free