The proclamation “I contain multitudes” waves like a banner in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” One of the great American bards, Whitman grasped the essential importance of bigness and variety for the United States—from swelling cities to the reaching plains, from the austere Yankee to the hounded slave.
American freedom also contains multitudes. Matching the great diversity of American life, a number of different understandings of freedom have permeated American culture since early colonial days. In his acclaimed 1989 book Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer sketches these different traditions of freedom. Recovering a sense of the diversity of freedom in American culture offers insight into contemporary debates.
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