The Marquis de Lafayette--the Frenchman who fought in the American Revolution--was the only foreigner to hold a major position among the Founding Fathers of the new nation. From his arrival in 1777 until, a century and a half later, the words "Lafayette, we are here!" stirred support for American intervention in World War I, the evolving image of Lafayette reflected popular opinion on various domestic and foreign issues.

Emblem of Liberty, the first comprehensive survey of Lafayette as a symbolic figure in American intellectual history, examines the compound image of the man and the ideas he represented. Professor Anne C. Loveland has based this wide-ranging study upon the massive Lafayette manuscript collection at Cornell University as well as a great variety of other sources.