Eric Foner · Lablypedia

Foner has published several books on the Reconstruction period, starting with Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. His online courses on "The Civil War and Reconstruction", published in 2014, was available from Columbia University on ColumbiaX.

In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Foner previously won the Bancroft Prize in 1989 for Reconstruction. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

Early life and education

Foner was born February 7, 1943, in New York City, New York, the son of Jewish parents, Liza (née Kraitz), a high school art teacher, and historian Jack D. Foner, who was active in the trade union movement and the campaign for civil rights for African Americans. Eric Foner describes his father as his "first great teacher", and recalls how

deprived of his livelihood while I was growing up, he supported our family as a freelance lecturer. [...] Listening to his lectures, I came to appreciate how present concerns can be illuminated by the study of the past—how the repression of the McCarthy era recalled the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the civil rights movement needed to be viewed in light of the great struggles of black and white abolitionists, and in the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the century could be found the antecedents of American intervention in Vietnam. I also imbibed a way of thinking about the past in which visionaries and underdogs—Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois—were as central to the historical drama as presidents and captains of industry, and how a commitment to social justice could infuse one's attitudes towards the past.

After graduating from Long Beach High School in 1959, Foner enrolled at Columbia University, where he was originally a physics major, before switching to history after taking a year-long seminar with James P. Shenton on the Civil War and Reconstruction during his junior year. "It probably determined that most of my career has been focused on that period," he recalled years later. A year later, in 1963, Foner graduated with a BA in history. He studied at the University of Oxford as a Kellett Fellow; he received a BA from Oriel College in 1965, where he was a member of the college's 1966 University Challenge-winning team, though he did not appear in the final, having already returned to the US. After graduating from Oxford, Foner returned to Columbia where he earned his doctoral degree in 1969 under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. His doctoral thesis, published in 1970 as Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, explored the deeply rooted ideals and interests that drove the northern majority to oppose slavery and ultimately wage war against Southern secession.

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Career

Writing on the Reconstruction Era

Foner is a leading authority on the Reconstruction Era. In a seminal essay in American Heritage in October 1982, later reprinted in Reviews in American History, Foner wrote:

In the past twenty years, no period of American history has been the subject of a more thoroughgoing reevaluation than Reconstruction—the violent, dramatic, and still controversial era following the Civil War. Race relations, politics, social life, and economic change during Reconstruction have all been reinterpreted in the light of changed attitudes toward the place of blacks within American society. If historians have not yet forged a fully satisfying portrait of Reconstruction as a whole, the traditional interpretation that dominated historical writing for much of this century has irrevocably been laid to rest.

"Foner has established himself as the leading authority on the Reconstruction period," wrote historian Michael Perman in reviewing Foner's book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. "This book is not simply a distillation of the secondary literature; it is a masterly account—broad in scope as well as rich in detail and insight." "This is history written on a grand scale, a masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history," David Herbert Donald wrote in The New Republic. C. Vann Woodward, in The New York Review of Books, wrote: "Eric Foner has put together this terrible story with greater cogency and power, I believe, than has been brought to the subject heretofore." Reconstruction won the 1989 Bancroft Prize, Francis Parkman Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, Avery O. Craven Prize, and Lionel Trilling Book Award.

In a 2009 essay, Foner pondered whether Reconstruction might have turned out differently:

It is wrong to think that, during the Civil War, President Lincoln embraced a single "plan" of Reconstruction. [...] Lincoln had always been willing to work closely with all factions of his party, including the Radicals on numerous occasions. I think it is quite plausible to imagine Lincoln and Congress agreeing to a Reconstruction policy encompassing basic civil rights for blacks (as was enacted in 1866) plus limited black suffrage, along the lines he proposed just before his death.

Foner published a short summary of his views on Reconstruction in The New York Times in 2015.

Writing on the Soviet Union

As a visiting professor in Moscow in the early 1990s, Foner would write about the broad interest in free markets among both his students and the Soviet public. He attributed these feeling with a mixture of historical illiteracy about the importance of the labor movement in the United States in the economic success of the nation and the mistaken creation of a white collared workforce, who's vision of capitalism he compared to Thomas Paine.

Foner would compare secessionist forces in the Soviet Union with the secession movement in the US in the 1860s. In a February 1991 article, Foner noted that the Baltic states claimed the right to secede because they had been unwillingly annexed. In addition, he believed that the Soviet Union did not protect minorities while it tried to nationalize the republics. Foner identified a threat to existing minority groups within the Baltic states, who were in turn threatened by the new nationalist movements.

In his 2001 address as president of the American Historical Association Foner would argue the emergence of the Cold War was propelled by an aversion to the Economy of the Soviet Union.

Writing on the September 11th Attacks

Foner was invited to contribute to an article in the London Review of Books published 3 weeks after the September 11th Attack. Foner opened his contribution writing "I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.".

Other publications and media appearances

In a New York Times op-ed, he criticized President Donald Trump's tweet calling for the preservation of Confederate monuments and heritage, stating that they represented and glorified white supremacy rather than collective heritage. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner was the first to associate the January 6 United States Capitol attack with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Foner has made appearances on shows such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show to discuss US history.

Reception

Journalist Nat Hentoff described Foner's The Story of American Freedom as "an indispensable book that should be read in every school in the land." "Eric Foner is one of the most prolific, creative, and influential American historians of the past 20 years," according to The Washington Post. His work is "brilliant, important," a reviewer wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

In a review of The Story of American Freedom in the New York Review of Books, Theodore Draper disagreed with Foner's conclusions, saying: "If the story of American freedom is told largely from the perspective of blacks and women, especially the former, it is not going to be a pretty tale. Yet most Americans thought of themselves not only as free but as the freest people in the world."

John Patrick Diggins of the City University of New York wrote that Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, was a "magisterial" and "moving" narrative, but compared Foner's "unforgiving" view of America for its racist past to his notably different views on the fall of communism and Soviet history.

Foner's book Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) was judged "intellectually probing and emotionally resonant" by the Los Angeles Times. His previous book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) was described by Library Journal as "stand[ing] out as the most sensible and sensitive reading of Lincoln's lifetime involvement with slavery and the most insightful assessment of Lincoln's—and indeed America's—imperative to move toward freedom lest it be lost."

Personal life

Foner was married to screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (née Achs) from 1965 to 1977. Since 1980, Foner has been married to historian Lynn Garafola. They have a daughter, Daria.