The Story of American Freedom.

ACENTURY and more after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced his monocausal interpretation of American history -- that life in the New World was marked by a long series of frontier experiences, each renewing democracy -- Eric Foner proposes another: the essential thread, he writes, is freedom.

The story as Foner sees it begins with the American Revolution, when adult white males fought for the Jeffersonian idea of freedom against British rule. In subsequent years the greatest contradiction to freedom was of course the imprisonment of most black Americans in slavery. The Civil War momentarily ended their servitude, but it was the lot of blacks who remained in the South to remain fettered for a century more. Meanwhile, the nation's women were, if not enslaved, then subjected to large restrictions, social and legal, until liberated by the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And then there were the masses of laborers who with industrialization before and notably after the Civil War found themselves working for pittances and trapped in their jobs because of the scarcity of employment elsewhere; they were the ''wage slaves'' of their times. Not to mention the Indians, the Mexicans in the Southwest, and the ''natives'' of the places brought into the American empire during and after the Spanish - American War.

But freedom, according to this new synthesis, was irrepressible, could not be put down. The greatest triumph came with the New Deal, with its emphasis on federal assistance and a bureaucracy to assure it, and the Cold War, wherein the challenge posed by the Soviet Union, a country possessed of the weapons of mass destruction, forced Americans to ensure their own freedom, notably through the civil- rights movement of the 1960s.

What to say about this Turnerian construction? Eric Foner has published books on aspects of American freedom, notably his Bancroft Prize work on Reconstruction after the Civil War. He has discussed his new book in seminars at Columbia University, his home institution, and his notes are forbiddingly voluminous -- a thorough exploration of the literature both of freedom and of its counter-idea, repression.

The easiest reply of a skeptical reader would be that no single theme can cover the extraordinary complexity of the American story. Turner's frontier thesis was good for American history only up to 1890, when the decennial census showed the disappearance of the frontier. A historian of a generation ago, William Appleman Williams, sought to extend Turner's frontier idea by asserting that with the war of 1898 and the wars of the twentieth century Americans' frontier turned outward. However, Williams's grand design -- principally economic, claiming that the new frontier was imperialistic -- has failed of acceptance; it flourished during the Vietnam War and died thereafter. A few other monocausal interpretations have appeared, and disappeared. The late Yale historian George W. Pierson divined the American character as partaking of ''mobility,'' with Americans making incessant moves as compared to Europeans. The problem was that mobility could confer no special trait upon anyone who called for the moving van.

Foner admits that freedom is synonymous, or nearly so, with liberty, and that from the Revolution onward one man's (or woman's) freedom could be another's servility. This may be the basic problem, for which each Columbia seminar student had a different suggestion. The quotations throughout the book often are individually convincing, but their thoughtfulness crumples in one's hand, since they come from such different eras or, as mentioned, simply juggle words. One of Foner's resources was the books of Walter Lippmann, who was a wondrous weather vane, always turning to a new interpretation. As Foner relates, Lippmann was in an anti-freedom phase in the 1920s. Whatever the columnist read about he sought in some way to revise; it was always difficult to pin him down.

Perplexed by a new monocausal interpretation I applied to a wise old friend, an historian, who spent some months in Berlin in 1929 and ever after has mulled over the question of what allowed Germany to turn to Hitler four years later, and why Great Britain and the United States, similarly afflicted by the Great Depression, did not. The answer, he says, must lie in some special qualities of national character, he cannot say what, that derive from historical experience. For him, he says, the idea of freedom begs the question.

Foner's book is layered in complexity. It approaches brilliance in relating the efforts of many Americans to advance freedom for everyone, of others to advance it for themselves. But his analysis somehow falls short of explaining the present-day stature of our country as the world's best-functioning economy and democracy and its only surviving superpower.

Mr. Ferrell, a professor emeritus of history at Indiana University, is the author of The Dying President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944 -1945, and The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge.