Eric Foner: Ranked with Hofstadter
... [Eric] Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has been for most of his adult life. Like his mentor Richard Hofstadter, he has had an enormous influence on how other historians, as well as a good cut of the general reading public, have come to think about American history. This is the result of his voluminous scholarship and of his decades as a teacher. Indeed, when one considers the chronological and topical range of Foner's many books and essays--not to mention those of his doctoral students--only Hofstadter, C. Vann Woodward, David Brion Davis, and, in an earlier era, Charles Beard (who was also at Columbia) would seem to be his genuine rivals in impact and accomplishment.
Foner has reached across the span of American history in The Story of American Freedom (1998) and Give Me Liberty! (2004). He has explored the radical political impulses of the latter half of the eighteenth century in Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), and has confronted the interpretive contexts of historical writing in Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002). In an innovative book of lectures, Nothing but Freedom (1983), he considered the slave emancipation process in very broad comparative perspective. Yet Foner's greatest energies have been devoted to the nineteenth century, and especially to the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Here his imprint has been wide and deep, and Forever Free, a book written chiefly for a non-academic audience, shows many of his important thematic marks.
The very title, Forever Free, with its subtitle joining emancipation and Reconstruction, not only identifies the central interpretive thrust of Foner's new book, but also reflects one of his major conceptual interventions, developed most fully in his justly acclaimed Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, which appeared in 1988. Unlike previous historians (regardless of their viewpoints) who understood Reconstruction principally as a political process meant to re-unite the nation, Foner sees it as a social and political process--a social and political revolution--commencing with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 rather than with the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865.
In this, Foner extends the remarkable insights of W.E.B. DuBois, whose Black Reconstruction in America--which appeared in 1935 and was long ignored by professional historians--placed slavery, slaves, and ex-slaves at the center of the great drama of national conflict. African Americans emerge as powerful political actors in Forever Free, as they did in DuBois's book. Their individual and collective decisions, their struggles, their challenges to authority, their courage in the face of repression, and their visions of freedom put emancipation on the table of Civil War policy, in Foner's judgment, and a new set of rights claims on the political board of Reconstruction. In the vivid pages of Forever Free, we become acquainted with these extraordinary people, some well-known, some virtually unknown--Robert Smalls, James K. Green, Henry Adams. We are also offered riveting images from the period and six stimulating essays by Joshua Brown on the changing visual culture of race and equality in nineteenth-century American society. ...
Read entire article at Stephen Hahn in the New Republic in the course of a review of Foner's Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (Knopf)
Foner has reached across the span of American history in The Story of American Freedom (1998) and Give Me Liberty! (2004). He has explored the radical political impulses of the latter half of the eighteenth century in Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), and has confronted the interpretive contexts of historical writing in Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002). In an innovative book of lectures, Nothing but Freedom (1983), he considered the slave emancipation process in very broad comparative perspective. Yet Foner's greatest energies have been devoted to the nineteenth century, and especially to the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Here his imprint has been wide and deep, and Forever Free, a book written chiefly for a non-academic audience, shows many of his important thematic marks.
The very title, Forever Free, with its subtitle joining emancipation and Reconstruction, not only identifies the central interpretive thrust of Foner's new book, but also reflects one of his major conceptual interventions, developed most fully in his justly acclaimed Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, which appeared in 1988. Unlike previous historians (regardless of their viewpoints) who understood Reconstruction principally as a political process meant to re-unite the nation, Foner sees it as a social and political process--a social and political revolution--commencing with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 rather than with the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865.
In this, Foner extends the remarkable insights of W.E.B. DuBois, whose Black Reconstruction in America--which appeared in 1935 and was long ignored by professional historians--placed slavery, slaves, and ex-slaves at the center of the great drama of national conflict. African Americans emerge as powerful political actors in Forever Free, as they did in DuBois's book. Their individual and collective decisions, their struggles, their challenges to authority, their courage in the face of repression, and their visions of freedom put emancipation on the table of Civil War policy, in Foner's judgment, and a new set of rights claims on the political board of Reconstruction. In the vivid pages of Forever Free, we become acquainted with these extraordinary people, some well-known, some virtually unknown--Robert Smalls, James K. Green, Henry Adams. We are also offered riveting images from the period and six stimulating essays by Joshua Brown on the changing visual culture of race and equality in nineteenth-century American society. ...