Eric Foner: The Conference Held in His Honor

Ms. Kornhauser is Lecturer in History at Princeton University.

He has been president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He has won the Bancroft Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received a Guggenheim and an NEH fellowship. He has been named Scholar of the Year, and has collected a Great Teacher Award from Columbia University alumni, among many, many other accolades. So what is left for Eric Foner to achieve? How about a conference (and related book) in his honor. Consider it done.

Ahead of a festschrift that dare not speak its name, several of Foner’s former graduate students put together a splendid two-day “conference in honor of Eric Foner,” which was held at Columbia over this past weekend and which featured 13 papers delivered by a flock of former Foner students. The conference, “Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History,” was sponsored by Columbia’s Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History and organized by Manisha Sinha (U-Mass Amherst) and Penny Von Eschen (Michigan) who are also editing the forthcoming collection of essays dedicated to Foner (Columbia University Press). Several weeks ago when he and I (another of his former students of more recent vintage) first talked about the impending event, he expressed concern that people would think he was about to retire. By the end of the affair, he seemed nothing but pleased. “Who wouldn’t be?” asked David Blight, one of several of Foner’s friends who participated in the conference.

I had to agree. Throughout the conference, Foner witnessed not only first-rate scholarship by a generation of graduate students who had begun work under him in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but also heartfelt gratitude from so many beneficiaries of his keen intellect and his peerless devotion to mentoring. If the themes of the papers ranged from the struggles of the excluded, to the limits of American democracy, to, as Columbia Professor Elizabeth Blackmar put it, “300 years of contestation” over the meaning of freedom, a theme of the more personal side of the conference heralded Foner’s uncanny ability to spot historical talent, even when it was expressed in less conventional ways. A number of Foner’s students of this earlier generation had prior careers, hailed from foreign countries where they had had little exposure to American history, or simply were uncertain as to whether they could succeed in academia. But, noted speaker after speaker, Foner has a knack for finding and then nurturing people who possess that special combination of sharp intellect, an abiding passion for history, and a sense that historians can make a difference in the world. Foner, in other words, has a knack for finding people not unlike him! (Though nobody, of course, can ever be quite like him.)

In his keynote address on Friday following the conference’s first two panels, Foner, in turn, paid homage to his late father, Jack, an accomplished historian in his own right, and to his teachers at Columbia, Richard Hofstadter, the unusually insightful scholar, and James Shenton, the unusually talented pedagogue. Foner’s talk, “The Story of American Freedom: Before 9/11 and After,” exemplified his ability to discuss the present without being presentist, and to make history matter without succumbing to the temptation of using the past as a guide to the future. The history of the United States offers us cautionary tales, Foner seemed to be telling us—for example, about repression during wartime, about Americans’ sense of superiority in the world, about the misleading uses of the concept of “freedom”—without prescribing what we ought to do in our own time, by definition a different time. Yet, the message seemed to be, knowledge of history gives us the courage to believe that we are not stuck in our present condition. And with that it was on to the reception.

The next day, Yale’s David Blight gave the conference’s closing remarks, which once again highlighted the hallmarks of Foner’s work: rigorous historical method combined with a deep caring for the less powerful, then and now. Blight quoted Foner on Foner that his book Reconstruction though ‘born in the archives’ was ‘written from the heart.’ Foner, Blight noted, stood for the proposition that the “past, present, and future” are “always everywhere entwined.” Just how they are entwined—that is the rub.