Liberty for Whom? The complex vision of Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry has inspired Americans for centuries with his fiery speech demanding liberty, but his vision was more complex than modern Americans might realize. Henry asserted liberty not just as individual freedom but as a collective right of states to govern themselves without being swallowed by a “great consolidated government.” 

David Kennedy is an American historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the former director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.

Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook, The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of the United States series. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his first book Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970), and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his book World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History from 1995 to 1996. He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (1999).