South Carolina led the southern walk-out from the 1948 Democratic National Convention. - Eric Foner

America's historic sense of mission has been redefined to mean the creation of a single global free market.

The United States was not the only nation to experience emancipation in the nineteenth century. Neither plantation slavery nor abolition were unique to the United States. But Reconstruction was.

American ideas about freedom certainly resonate abroad. Eastern Europeans embraced them after the collapse of Communist rule. Indeed, the years since 1989 have witnessed an unprecedented internationalization of current American concepts of freedom.