This book is not an investigation of the amendment itself, but rather an elegantly structured chronicle of how First Amendment freedoms have played a pivotal role in shaping American history. Many extracts from this excellent collection are linked by an urgent desire to attain a balance between security and freedom in times of national emergency or trauma, from the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to the Vietnam-era legal battle between the New York Times and Washington Post and the federal government. Though many documents show that the American constitutional heritage rebels at the prospect of giving government the capacity to control men's minds, there are also unsettling reminders of just how fragile is this “bold experiment” (11) in liberty. As the authors note, while many Americans are keen to proclaim rights for themselves, they all too frequently flinch from extending protection to others. The introduction illustrates with limpid clarity how the First Amendment becomes a hollow promise unless it safeguards the rights of even the smallest minorities and the least popular communities. The drive to sustain and expand the American commitment to individual freedom, as the nation grows increasingly complex and diverse, is an issue that resonates through later chapters, when the US Supreme Court weighs in to define the scope of First Amendment privileges.

The story opens in 1663, when the colony of Rhode Island became the first place in the New World to guarantee full religious liberty for every person. The final chapter focusses on fiery debates surrounding the constitutionality of the 2001 Patriot Act and, among other controversies, the National Security Agency's unlimited surveillance powers. Historical documents such as charters, petitions, court decisions and records of confrontation reflect the ongoing struggle to uphold basic and inalienable rights that make it possible to follow one's conscience, argue for justice, and organize for social change.

The early chapters present key foundational texts whose formulations led to the drafting of the First Amendment in 1789. The discussion of George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights (33–39), passed unanimously in the Virginia Assembly on 12 June 1776, focusses on the immediate and widespread impact of this document. First Freedoms traces how its language and concepts influenced Thomas Jefferson in his crafting of the Declaration of Independence on behalf of all thirteen colonies. And in 1789 the Virginia Declaration was employed both by James Madison, in drafting the Bill of Rights for the US Constitution, and by Marquis de Lafayette, in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

First Freedoms also explores fascinating material concerning those oppressed and marginalized groups in early America, such as African Americans and Native Americans, who campaigned for equal treatment under the law. David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (56–63), which had a profound effect on the beginnings of the abolitionist movement, is a notable inclusion. The antislavery editor William Lloyd Garrison, whom some historians credit with being the first to push for the immediate end to slavery, was impelled to disavow his gradualist stance on abolition after reading Walker's tract. Within months of its publication, copies of the Appeal had made it as far south as the port city of Savannah, Georgia, and been seen from Virginia to Louisiana, thanks largely to resourceful and courageous free blacks who helped disseminate the work. The authors of First Freedoms could have probed further the means by which Walker secured extensive distribution of this seminal tract, since some commentators have speculated that Walker allegedly sewed copies of the Appeal into the lining of clothing he sold; sailors then surreptitiously circulated the copies. Such hazardous possibilities may have prompted slaveholders to pass laws preventing black sailors from leaving their ships while in southern ports.

First Freedoms is especially rich and informative on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US constitution – religious liberty, and freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition – played a vital part. The chapter on the 1963 Official Program for the March on Washington (180–84) carefully charts how Congress was wrestling with whether or not to pass President John F. Kennedy's civil rights legislation, while young and old people across the country were being incarcerated for peacefully assembling to protest the South's policies of institutional racism.

That this incisive documentary account includes extracts from Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (2001) underlines how the history of First Amendment rights is marked by “trial and error” (11). Since the Patriot Act is a symbolic target for Americans anxious about radically amplified government capabilities to prosecute an open-ended “war on terror,” I would have liked more emphasis in this closing chapter on whether Congress went too far – or perhaps not far enough – when it passed this 342-page bill, which was, according to many political pundits, rushed through the House and Senate with little debate. While acknowledging the need for additional law-enforcement tools after 9/11, critics charge that some of the act's provisions and some of the executive orders issued in the wake of the act's passage are unconstitutional. As the editors suggest, the “biggest lightning rod” (227) for opposition to the act has been Section 215, the provision that increases the ability of federal investigators to obtain library, bookstore, and other records secretly.

Given the Byzantine complexity of the Patriot Act's myriad provisions – and the secrecy surrounding techniques of intercepting and obstructing terrorist activity – more detailed scrutiny of the document would have been welcome. Overall, though, First Freedoms is a timely and trenchant reminder of the bitter human struggles and sacrifices involved in keeping the First Amendment resiliently intact.