The Changing Face of American Freedom

I've just posted a new paper, The Changing Face of American Freedom. It's the product of my internship this summer at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Currently, the museum is quite small, with enough space for one exhibit at a time. The groundbreaking for a new building, however, will take place next year, with an entirely new museum opening at some point in 2007. The new museum will have an extensive permanent exhibition that traces Jewish American history from 1654, when the first Jews arrived in what would become the United States, to the present.

This paper helps illuminates one of the museum's major themes: freedom. It's hardly exhaustive, considering the space constraints given (as it is, it's four pages over what was asked of me), but it does outline the key feature of an accurate narrative of freedom in America: freedom has been an dynamic concept in America, with both its definition and its beneficiaries changing dramatically in the course of the past few centuries.