The Freedoms We Lost

A brilliant and original examination of American freedom as it existed before the Revolution, from the Smithsonian’s curator of social history.   The American Revolution is widely understood—by schoolchildren and citizens alike—as having ushered in “freedom” as we know it, a freedom that places voting at the center of American democracy. In a sharp break from this view, historian Barbara Clark Smith charts the largely unknown territory of the unique freedoms enjoyed by colonial American sub