The inscription on “America's most famous relic,” the Liberty Bell, reads, “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof” (i, ix). Gary Nash's elegant and engaging history tells us how the bell and its message have resounded – or not – over the years since its arrival in Philadelphia in August 1752. Cast by the famous Whitechapel Foundry in London on a commission from the Pennsylvania Assembly, “the bell struck a loud bong, reverberated” and, to the crowd's consternation, “cracked at the brim” (6–7). Ambitious local artisans John Pass and John Stow demolished the bell, recast it, and then had to recast it again. Finally installed in State House tower in June 1753, the bell would mark the way through the escalating imperial crisis toward American independence. But independence was not the “Liberty” the bell's authors originally envisioned. The surrounding passages in Leviticus 25, the source of the inscription, invoke the Israelites' year of Jubilee when, after fifty years, “ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family” (4). Assembly speaker Isaac Norris II ordered the inscription in 1751, at Pennsylvania's “Jubilee,” exactly a half-century after William Penn granted the colony its constitution, the Frame of 1701. At this very moment reformers John Woolman and Anthony Benezet “were railing against slavery,” urging their fellow “Quakers to cleanse themselves of their deep-dyed sin” (5). Nash thus concludes that the bell's inscription, proclaiming liberty “throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof, contained a strong, if muffled, antislavery message” (6, original emphasis).

The antislavery message would be “muffled” through much of the bell's history, though it would resound again during the sectional crisis and Civil War and – after a long hiatus – during the civil rights movement. The universality of the bell's appeal receded before its status as a symbol of national identity, focussing on that moment – 8 July 1776 – when it drew a large crowd to the State House yard to hear the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. The principles Thomas Jefferson set forth in the Declaration might be universal at some distant future date, as other peoples followed the American example, but patriots fought for their own freedom – and few of them considered freeing their slaves. This tension between the particular and the universal, between “celebrating past accomplishments in the name of freedom” and recognizing the urgency of “the nation's uncompleted agenda,” constitutes the main theme and contribution of Nash's study (164). The question has always been, for whom does the Liberty Bell toll? It is the question implicit in ongoing debates over what “American exceptionalism” really means: is it the precious legacy of “past accomplishments” that must be preserved against all threats, foreign or domestic? Or is it instead the redemption of Liberty's promise to all Americans and to the world beyond its borders?

Most of this short book is devoted to the Liberty Bell's emergence as an icon. In its early career it was by no means clear that the bell would survive at all, much less become a semisacred object of patriotic devotion. Because Philadelphians needed better bells to keep time for the expanding and industrializing city, the “Old Bell” was periodically in danger of being banished or demolished: in the 1820s, city fathers offered to sell the bell to bell-maker William Meredith as scrap for four hundred dollars – it was too steep a price. But the movements of the bell in the State House, its deteriorating condition – with the now famous crack emerging at some point – and the depredations of souvenir seekers awakened patriots to the danger of its loss. At the same time, myth-makers such as novelist George Lippard began to fabricate evocative and sentimental stories about the bell's great moment, now fixed at 4 July, not 8 July, when congressmen signed the Declaration (they only began to do so in August) and a young “boy with blue eyes and flaxen hair” called out “Ring!” from the State House yard to an “old man with white hair and sunburnt face” in the steeple who sounded the tocsin of freedom (43–44). The State House now became “Independence Hall” and, thanks to the publications of abolitionists in New York and Boston, the Old Bell became the “Liberty Bell.” Rescued from obscurity and destruction, the Liberty Bell was launched on its iconic career, traveling far and wide through the reproduction of its image and of the bell itself; millions of visitors came to see it and its progeny at the great Centennial Exposition of 1876. Between 1885 and 1915, the bell took to the road for seven trips, to be seen, touched, and kissed by millions more (it was estimated that almost two million people kissed the bell at the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, on its last trip, in 1915). The peripatetic career of the Liberty Bell, the extraordinary accessibility of this unique, iconic object, and the ubiquity of reproductions and representations secured its fixed place in the national imaginary.

Nash is an authoritative chronicler of the Liberty Bell's travels, real and metaphorical. In the end, the story turns out to be a very personal one, as Nash recounts his struggles with fellow historians to guarantee that visitors to the National Park Service's new Liberty Bell Center would be exposed to the more profound and complicated story that he recounts in this book. Thanks in large part to their efforts, visitors now learn that President George Washington's mansion, including quarters for his slaves, was located on the site of the Center; they will learn that the Bell struck different, sometimes discordant, notes throughout its history, evoking dreams of liberation as well as mythic memories of national origins. As Nash concludes, visitors now can “see the Liberty Bell in all of its many stages of life, in all of its triumphs and travails, in all of the ways it has moved and inspired people from nearly every country in the world. Now it is truly everyone's bell” (217). Gary Nash has devoted his career to giving his fellow Americans an honest, but nonetheless inspiring, understanding of their national history. The Liberty Bell is an eloquent testament to his faith in the American promise, enabling us to hear with fresh ears the bell's original and enduring message of “Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”