The Fourth of July, Independence Day, is one of those holidays. For me the Fourth of July is, among other things, the celebration of summer itself, in all its glorious sunshine and bounty, its buoyant breezes, its green grass and leafy trees, its morning birdsong and bright butterflies, its evening fireflies and thunderstorms.
This week I’ve been re-reading bits of Liberty and Freedom, A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2005), by David Hackett Fisher, one of my favorite historians. Just as he did with his earlier Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), in Liberty and Freedom Fisher describes the importance to our shared citizenship of Americans’ ancestral, handed-down understandings and ways of thinking and being, what Fischer calls our “folkways.” And he describes how those understandings and ways color and shape meaning and value for us. The book is full of pictures, as Fischer uses American images and tropes, from the birth of the nation to the early 21st century, to help tell this story, teasing out diverse meanings and values that these images encapsulate.
In the final chapter of the book, Fischer summarizes some key insights:
(p. 722)