Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present

The authors collaborated previously on three works of history; Oscar Handlin alone has written more than two-score books. Here, with a richly satisfying emphasis on the details of everyday life among the earliest settlers, who came to the New World from a violence-prone, intolerant Europe after 1600, the Handlins explore the relationship between power and liberty as it changed, shifted and grew for more than a century-and-a-half. Their book, consistently absorbing, superbly human, often sharply ironic, covers the settlers' response to the traditions local communities, beginning in Plymouth, brought from the Old World. Wilderness America afforded space for dissenters with their own notions of liberty and order. Hence, the chaos of colonization from Roger Williams in New England through the religious ""Great Awakening'' of the mid-1700s led to the development of an independent spirit that marks the American people to this day, even as it set the stage for the eventual Declaration and the history-making Constitution. (September 10)