Eric Foner

This "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.

America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

Reconstruction

Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize: from a master historian, the story of Lincoln's—and the nation's—transformation through the crucible of slavery and emancipation. In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Although “naturally anti-slavery” for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states. But the political landscape is transformed in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act makes the expansion of slavery a national issue. A man of considered words and deliberate actions, Lincoln navigates the dynamic politics deftly, taking measured steps, often along a path forged by abolitionists and radicals in his party. Lincoln rises to leadership in the new Republican Party by calibrating his politics to the broadest possible antislavery coalition. As president of a divided nation and commander in chief at war, displaying a similar compound of pragmatism and principle, Lincoln finally embraces what he calls the Civil War's “fundamental and astounding” result: the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery and recognition of blacks as American citizens. Foner's Lincoln emerges as a leader, one whose greatness lies in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike. This powerful work will transform our understanding of the nation's greatest president and the issue that mattered most.

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Give Me Liberty! is the #1 book in the U.S. history survey course because it works in the classroom. A single-author text by a leader in the field, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, accessible, concise, and integrated American history. Updated with powerful new scholarship on borderlands and the West, the Fifth Edition brings new interactive History Skills Tutorials and Norton InQuizitive for History, the award-winning adaptive quizzing tool. The best-selling Seagull Edition is also available in full color for the first time.

How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

The Second Founding

An abridged version of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of the aftermath of the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, and Lionel Trilling Prize.

A Short History of Reconstruction

DeWitt Professor of History Eric Foner

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom.

The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

Gateway to Freedom

Presents a significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War.

The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War: With a New Introductory Essay

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men

The leading text in the U.S. survey course.

An American History

Give Me Liberty!

Chronicles the history of America's pursuit of liberty, tracing the struggles among freed slaves, union organizers, women rights advocates, and other groups to widen freedom's promise

The Story of American Freedom

America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New American Nation Series)

Reconstruction Updated Edition

Emancipation and Its Legacy (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History)

Nothing but Freedom

[This text] is a survey of American history from the earliest days of European exploration and conquest of the New World to the dawn of the twenty-first century. It offers students a ... concise narrative whose central theme is the changing contours of American freedom ... Aimed at an audience of undergraduate students with little or no detailed knowledge of American history, [the text] guides readers through the complexities of the subject without overwhelming them with excessive detail. The unifying theme of freedom that runs through the text gives shape to the narrative and integrates the numerous strands that make up the American experience. [This book] places events and personalities in the foreground and is more geared to the structure of the introductory survey course.-Pref.

Give Me Liberty!: To 1877

Analyzes the post-Civil War era of Emancipation and Reconstruction with an emphasis on discovering the larger political and cultural meaning for contemporary America of the lives of the newly freed slaves and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

The Story of Emancipation And Reconstruction

Forever Free

David Farber

Looks at the sixties in terms of its place in American history, and discusses the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the drug culture

America in the 1960s

The Age of Great Dreams

“Who Owns History? testifies to Eric Foner’s lifelong personal commitment to writing histories that advance the struggle for racial equality and economic justice.” —David Glassberg, The Sunday Star-Ledger History has become a matter of public controversy, as Americans clash over such things as museum presentations, the flying of the Confederate flag, and reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it? Eric Foner answers these and other questions about the historian’s relationship to the world of the past and future in this provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history—or should.

Rethinking the Past in a Changing World

Who Owns History?

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time. The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

Nat Turner

An American History, Seagull Edition (Single-Volume Edition) (Seagull Edition)

In a landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Foner gives us a life of Lincoln as it intertwined with slavery, the defining issue of the time and the tragic hallmark of American history. The author demonstrates how Lincoln navigated a dynamic political landscape deftly, moving in measured steps, often on a path forged by abolitionists and radicals in his party, and that Lincoln's greatness lay in his capacity for moral and political growth.

Eric Foner

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