Eric Foner

Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks, such as the Give Me Liberty! series for high school classrooms. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses.
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, are available from Columbia University on ColumbiaX.
In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial 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, 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
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 summa cum laude 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.

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,
"Foner has established himself as the leading authority on the Reconstruction period," wrote historian Michael Perman in reviewing Reconstruction. "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."
In a 2009 essay, Foner pondered whether Reconstruction might have turned out differently.
Foner published a short summary of his views on Reconstruction in The New York Times in 2015.

Secession and the Soviet Union

As a visiting professor in Moscow in the early 1990s, Foner compared secessionist forces in the USSR 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.

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 was judged "intellectually probing and emotionally resonant" by the Los Angeles Times. His previous book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery was described by Library Journal as "In the vast library on Lincoln, Foner's book stands 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."

Awards and honors

In 1989, Foner received the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. In 1991, Foner received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. In 1995, he was named by the New York Council for the Humanities.
In 2009, Foner was inducted as a laureate of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln by the Governor of Illinois as a Bicentennial Laureate.
In 2012, Foner received the Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement.
In 2020, Foner was awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award from the Organization of American Historians which goes to an individual or individuals whose contributions have significantly enriched our understanding and appreciation of American history.

Personal life

Foner was married to screenwriter Naomi Foner from 1965 to 1977. Since 1982, Foner has been married to historian Lynn Garafola. They have a daughter, Daria.

Works

Books

Reissued with a new preface.
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Political history; and winner, in 1989, of the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize. Updated edition published in 2014 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
An abridgement of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.
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A survey of United States history, published with companion volumes of documents.
Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, , and .
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Some of his books have been translated into Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese.

Selected articles

Column on George W. Bush.
Foner, Eric. "Lincoln and Colonization", in Foner, Eric, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. W. W. Norton & Co.
Foner, Eric. "Abraham Lincoln, Colonization, and the Rights of Black Americans", in Richard Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson, Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Foner, Eric, "The Corrupt Bargain", London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 3, 5–6. Foner concludes : "Rooted in distrust of ordinary citizens and, like so many other features of American life, in the institution of slavery, the electoral college is a relic of a past the United States should have abandoned long ago."
Foner, Eric, , The Nation, vol. 314, no. 8, pp. 32–37. Highlighted are the struggles and tragic fates of America's Indians and Black slaves. For example, "In 1779 Washington dispatched a contingent of soldiers to upstate New York to burn Indian towns and crops and seize hostages 'of every age and sex.' The following year, while serving as governor of Virginia, Jefferson ordered troops under the command of George Rogers Clark to enter the Ohio Valley and bring about the expulsion or 'extermination' of local Indians."
Foner, Eric, "The Little Man's Big Friends", London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 11, pp. 29–30. "More than half a century after he stood in the 'schoolhouse door', the ghost of George Wallace still haunts American politics."