Eric Foner explores the instance of freedom in America from its founding to the end of the 20th century. He describes how freedom is not a fixed and prescribed set of inherited ideas but something that has changed, altered and evolved through time by the actions of different groups of people who claim to possess it. He encompasses the nature of nationalism and the imagined community that constituted the Nation, the concept and practice of slavery and how it shaped groups like the abolitionists, early feminists and the labour movement.