Eric Foner

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About Eric Foner
Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. In his teaching and scholarship, Foner focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. His "Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877," won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book prizes and remains the standard history of the period. In 2006 Foner received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. He is currently writing a book on Lincoln and slavery.
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Titles By Eric Foner
“Gripping and essential.”—Jesse Wegman, New York Times
An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.
From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period that shaped modern America.
Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed.
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.
This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.
The leading U.S. history textbook, with a new focus on “Who is an American?”
A powerful text by an acclaimed historian, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, concise, and integrated American history. In the Sixth Edition, Eric Foner addresses a question that has motivated, divided, and stirred passionate debates: “Who is an American?” With new coverage of issues of inclusion and exclusion—reinforced by new primary source features in the text—Give Me Liberty! strengthens students’ most important historical thinking skills.
The Seagull Edition offers the complete text of the Full Edition in full color and a portable trim size with fewer illustrations and maps and an exceptionally low price. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny.
In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks.
Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.
“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe
Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politician grounded in principle, deftly navigating the dynamic politics of antislavery, secession, and civil war. Lincoln's greatness emerges from his capacity for moral and political growth.
From the “preeminent historian of Reconstruction” (New York Times Book Review), an updated abridged edition of Reconstruction, the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America.
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the quest of emancipated slaves’ searching for economic autonomy and equal citizenship, and describes the remodeling of Southern society; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and one committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.
This “masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history” (New Republic) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.
Eric Foner’s best-selling reader, the best value for the U.S. survey
Voices of Freedom is the only reader with a thematic focus on American freedom. The organization of this enormously popular, compact, and accessible primary source documents collection mirrors the best-selling Give Me Liberty! survey texts. Much more affordable than other readers of its kind, it is an exceptional value in print and ebook formats. The Sixth Edition features new selections that focus on issues of inclusion and exclusion and the question, “Who is an American?”
The leading U.S. history textbook, with a new focus on “Who is an American?”
A powerful text by an acclaimed historian, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, concise, and integrated American history. In the Sixth Edition, Eric Foner addresses a question that has motivated, divided, and stirred passionate debates: “Who is an American?” With new coverage of issues of inclusion and exclusion—reinforced by new primary source features in the text—Give Me Liberty! strengthens students’ most important historical thinking skills.
The Brief Edition is 30% shorter than the Full Edition and features a slightly smaller trim size. It shares the same pedagogical features of the Full Edition. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
The leading U.S. history textbook, with a new focus on “Who is an American?”
A powerful text by an acclaimed historian, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, concise, and integrated American history. In the Sixth Edition, Eric Foner addresses a question that has motivated, divided, and stirred passionate debates: “Who is an American?” With new coverage of issues of inclusion and exclusion—reinforced by new primary source features in the text—Give Me Liberty! strengthens students’ most important historical thinking skills. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
The leading U.S. history textbook, with a new focus on “Who is an American?”
A powerful text by an acclaimed historian, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, concise, and integrated American history. In the Sixth Edition, Eric Foner addresses a question that has motivated, divided, and stirred passionate debates: “Who is an American?” With new coverage of issues of inclusion and exclusion—reinforced by new primary source features in the text—Give Me Liberty! strengthens students’ most important historical thinking skills.
The Brief Edition is 30% shorter than the Full Edition and features a slightly smaller trim size. It shares the same pedagogical features of the Full Edition. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
The leading U.S. history textbook, with a new focus on “Who is an American?”
A powerful text by an acclaimed historian, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, concise, and integrated American history. In the Sixth Edition, Eric Foner addresses a question that has motivated, divided, and stirred passionate debates: “Who is an American?” With new coverage of issues of inclusion and exclusion—reinforced by new primary source features in the text—Give Me Liberty! strengthens students’ most important historical thinking skills.
The Brief Edition is 30% shorter than the Full Edition and features a slightly smaller trim size. It shares the same pedagogical features of the Full Edition. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom.
More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom.
A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery.
To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood.
Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.
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