Eric Foner
Foner in 2009
Born	(1943-02-07)February 7, 1943 (age 82) New York City, U.S.
Spouses	Naomi Achs ​ ​ (m. 1965; div. 1977)​ Lynn Garafola ​ ​ (m. 1980)​
Children	1
Parent	Jack D. Foner (father)
Awards	Bancroft Prize (1989; 2011) Lincoln Prize (2011) Pulitzer Prize (2011)
Academic background
Alma mater	Columbia University Oriel College, Oxford
Doctoral advisor	Richard Hofstadter
Influences	James P. Shenton
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Americanpolitical history
Institutions	City College of New York Columbia University
Notable students	Elizabeth Hinton Mae Ngai
Notable works	Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution - 1863-1877 (1988) The Fiery Trial (2010)

Eric Foner (/ˈfoʊnər/; born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. He writes extensively onAmericanpolitical history, the history of freedom, the earlyhistory of the Republican Party,African American biography, theAmerican Civil War,Reconstruction, andhistoriography, and has been a member of the faculty at theColumbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks, such as theGive Me Liberty series for high school classrooms. According to theOpen Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses.^[1]

Foner has published several books on the Reconstruction period, starting withReconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988.^[2] His online courses on "The Civil War and Reconstruction", published in 2014, are available from Columbia University on ColumbiaX.^[3]

In 2011, Foner'sThe Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) won thePulitzer Prize for History, theLincoln Prize, and theBancroft Prize.^[4][5] Foner previously won the Bancroft Prize in 1989 for his bookReconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. In 2000, he was elected president of theAmerican Historical Association.^[6] He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 2018.^[7]

Foner was born February 7, 1943,^[8] in New York City, New York, the son of Jewish parents, Liza (née Kraitz), a high school art teacher, and historianJack D. Foner, who was active in thetrade union movement and thecampaign for civil rights for African Americans. Eric Foner describes his father as his "first great teacher", and recalls how

deprived of his livelihood while I was growing up, he supported our family as a freelance lecturer. ... Listening to his lectures, I came to appreciate how present concerns can be illuminated by the study of the past—how the repression of theMcCarthy era recalled the days of theAlien and Sedition Acts, thecivil rights movement needed to be viewed in light of thegreat struggles of black and white abolitionists, and in the brutal suppression of thePhilippine insurrection at the turn of the century could be found the antecedents ofAmerican intervention in Vietnam. I also imbibed a way of thinking about the past in which visionaries and underdogs—Tom Paine,Wendell Phillips,Eugene V. Debs, andW. E. B. Du Bois—were as central to the historical drama as presidents and captains of industry, and how a commitment tosocial justice could infuse one's attitudes towards the past.^[9]

After graduating fromLong Beach High School in 1959, Foner enrolled at Columbia University, where he was originally a physicsmajor, before switching to history after taking a year-long seminar withJames 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.^[10] A year later, in 1963, Foner graduatedsumma cum laude with a BA in history. He studied at theUniversity of Oxford as aKellett Fellow; he received a BA fromOriel College in 1965, where he was a member of the college's 1966University Challenge winning team, though he did not appear in the final, having already returned to the US.^[11] After graduating from Oxford, Foner returned to Columbia where he earned his doctoral degree in 1969 under the supervision ofRichard Hofstadter. His doctoral thesis, published in 1970 asFree 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.

Foner is a leading authority on the Reconstruction Era. In a seminal essay inAmerican Heritage in October 1982, later reprinted inReviews in American History, Foner wrote,

In the past twenty years, no period of American history has been the subject of a more thoroughgoing reevaluation than Reconstruction—the violent, dramatic, and still controversial era following the Civil War. Race relations, politics, social life, and economic change during Reconstruction have all been reinterpreted in the light of changed attitudes toward the place of blacks within American society. If historians have not yet forged a fully satisfying portrait of Reconstruction as a whole, the traditional interpretation that dominated historical writing for much of this century has irrevocably been laid to rest.^[12]

"Foner has established himself as the leading authority on the Reconstruction period," wrote historian Michael Perman in reviewingReconstruction. "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."^[2] "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 inThe New Republic.C. Vann Woodward, inThe 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."^[13]

In a 2009 essay, Foner pondered whether Reconstruction might have turned out differently.

It is wrong to think that, during the Civil War,President Lincoln embraced a single "plan" of Reconstruction. ...
Lincoln had always been willing to work closely with all factions of his party, including the Radicals on numerous occasions. I think it is quite plausible to imagine Lincoln and Congress agreeing to a Reconstruction policy encompassing basic civil rights for blacks (as was enacted in 1866) plus limited black suffrage, along the lines he proposed just before his death. ...^[14]

Foner published a short summary of his views on Reconstruction inThe New York Times in 2015.^[15]

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.^[16]

In aNew York Times op-ed, he criticized PresidentDonald Trump's tweet calling for thepreservation of Confederate monuments and heritage, stating that they represented and glorifiedwhite supremacy rather than collective heritage.^[17] According to historianTimothy Snyder, Foner was the first to associate thestorming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with section three of theFourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.^[18]

Foner has made multiple appearance on shows such asThe Colbert Report andThe Daily Show to discuss US history.^[19][20][21]

JournalistNat Hentoff described Foner'sThe Story of American Freedom as "an indispensable book that should be read in every school in the land."^[22] "Eric Foner is one of the most prolific, creative, and influential American historians of the past 20 years," according toThe Washington Post. His work is "brilliant, important," a reviewer wrote in theLos Angeles Times.^[23]

In a review ofThe Story of American Freedom in theNew 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."^[24]

John Patrick Diggins of theCity University of New York wrote that Foner'sReconstruction: 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.^[25]

Foner's bookGateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) was judged "intellectually probing and emotionally resonant" by theLos Angeles Times.^[26] His previous bookThe Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) was described byLibrary 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."^[27]

In 1989, Foner received the Avery O. Craven Award from theOrganization of American Historians. In 1991, Foner received the Great Teacher Award from theSociety of Columbia Graduates.^[28] In 1995, he was namedScholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities.^[29]

In 2009, Foner was inducted as a laureate of theLincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois as a Bicentennial Laureate.^[30]

In 2012, Foner received the Lincoln Forum'sRichard Nelson Current Award of Achievement.^[31]

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.^[32]

Foner was married to screenwriterNaomi Foner (née Achs) from 1965 to 1977.^[33] Since 1982, Foner has been married to historianLynn Garafola.^[34] They have a daughter, Daria.^[35]

External videos
Booknotes interview with Foner onThe Story of American Freedom, November 15, 1998,C-SPAN
Presentation by Foner and Joshua Brown onForever Free, January 12, 2006,C-SPAN
Presentation by Foner onThe Fiery Trial, October 27, 2010,C-SPAN
Interview with Foner onThe Fiery Trial, September 24, 2011,C-SPAN
Presentation by Foner onThe Fiery Trial, September 24, 2011,C-SPAN
After Words interview with Foner onGateway to Freedom, March 21, 2015,C-SPAN
Presentation by Foner onGateway to Freedom, September 30, 2015,C-SPAN
Presentation by Foner onThe Second Founding, October 2, 2019,C-SPAN

• Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995 [1970].ISBN 978-0-19-509497-8. Reissued with a new preface.^[36]
• America's Black Past: A Reader in Afro-American History. New York: Harper & Row. 1970., editor^[37]
• Nat Turner. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1971.ISBN 978-0-13-933143-5., editor^[38]
• Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1976.ISBN 978-0-19-501986-5.^[39]
• Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1980.ISBN 978-0-19-502781-5.^[40]
• Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1983.ISBN 978-0-8071-1118-5.^[41]
• Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row. 1988.ISBN 978-0-06-015851-4. Political history; and winner, in 1989, of theBancroft Prize, theFrancis Parkman Prize, theLos Angeles Times Book Award, theAvery O. Craven Prize, and theLionel Trilling Prize. Updated edition published in 2014 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
• A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row. 1990.ISBN 978-0-06-096431-3. An abridgement ofReconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.^[42]
• Foner, Eric; Mahoney, Olivia (1990).A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society.ISBN 978-0-393-02755-6.^[43]
• Foner, Eric;Garraty, John Arthur (1991).The Reader's Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.ISBN 978-0-395-51372-9.^[44]
• The Tocsin of Freedom: The Black Leadership of Radical Reconstruction. Gettysburg, Pa.: Gettysburg College. 1992.^[45]
• Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994.ISBN 978-0-19-952266-8.^[46]
• Foner, Eric; Mahoney, Olivia (1995).America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War. New York: HarperPerennial.ISBN 978-0-06-055346-3.^[47]
• Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (rev. ed.). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1996.ISBN 978-0-8071-2082-8.^[48]
• The New American History (rev. ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1997.ISBN 978-1-56639-551-9., editor^[49]
• The Story of American Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton. 1998.ISBN 978-0-393-04665-6.^[50]
• Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. New York: Hill and Wang. 2002.ISBN 978-0-8090-9704-3.^[51]
• Give Me Liberty!: An American History. New York: W.W. Norton. 2004.ISBN 978-0-393-97872-8. A survey of United States history, published with companion volumes of documents.^[52]
• Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History,ISBN 978-0-393-92503-6 (vol. 1), andISBN 978-0-393-92504-3 (2 vols.).^[53][54]
• Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2005.ISBN 978-0-375-40259-3.^[55]
• Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and his World. New York:W. W. Norton. 2008.ISBN 978-0-393-06756-9., editor^[56]
• The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York:W. W. Norton. 2010.^[57]
• Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York:W. W. Norton & Co. 2015.ISBN 978-0-393-24407-6.
• Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History.I. B. Tauris. 2017.ISBN 978-1-78453-769-2.
• The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. New York:W. W. Norton. 2019.ISBN 978-0-393-65258-1.
• Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays. New York:W. W. Norton. 2025.ISBN 978-1-324-11061-3.

Some of his books have been translated into Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese.

• Foner, Eric (July–September 1978)."Radical Individualism in America: Revolution to Civil War".Literature of Liberty.1 (3):1–31.
• Foner, Eric (October–November 1983)."The New View of Reconstruction".American Heritage.34 (6).
• Foner, Eric (Spring 1984). "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?".History Workshop Journal.17 (17):57–80.doi:10.1093/hwj/17.1.57.JSTOR 4288545.
• Foner, Eric (March 1989)."The South's Inner Civil War".American Heritage. Vol. 40, no. 2. Archived fromthe original on December 18, 2013.
• Foner, Eric (January 27, 2000)."Rebel Yell".The Nation.
• Foner, Eric (September 5, 2002)."Changing History".The Nation.
• Foner, Eric (December 10, 2002)."The Century, A Nation's Eye View".The Nation.
• Foner, Eric (April 13, 2003)."Not All Freedom Is Made In America".The New York Times.
• Foner, Eric (June 2, 2003)."Dare Call It Treason".The Nation.
• Foner, Eric (June 26, 2003)."Diversity Over Justice".The Nation.
• Foner, Eric (September 6, 2004)."Rethinking American History in a Post-9/11 World".History News Network.
• Foner, Eric (2006)."Expert Report of Eric Foner: from Gratz, et al. v. Bollinger, et al". Archived fromthe original on August 29, 2006.
• Foner, Eric (December 3, 2006)."He's the Worst Ever".The Washington Post. Column on George W. Bush.
• Foner, Eric (2008). "Lincoln andColonization", in Foner, Eric, ed.,Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. W. W. Norton & Co.
• Foner, Eric (Winter 2009)."If Lincoln Hadn't Died..."American Heritage. Vol. 58, no. 6.Archived from the original on February 19, 2014.
• Foner, Eric (October 10, 2011)."The Civil War in 'Postracial' America".The Nation. Archived fromthe original on October 1, 2011. RetrievedFebruary 7, 2012.
• Foner, Eric (2011). "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 (November 2012)."The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction – and Vice-Versa".Columbia Law Review.112 (7).Columbia Law School:1585–1606.JSTOR 41708159. Archived fromthe original on November 17, 2015.Pdf.
• Foner, Eric (January 1, 2013)."The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln".The New York Times.
• Foner, Eric, "The Corrupt Bargain" (review ofAlexander Keyssar,Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, Harvard, 2020, 544 pp.,ISBN 978 0 674 66015 1; andJesse Wegman,Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, St Martin's Press, 2020, 304 pp.,ISBN 978 1 250 22197 1),London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 10 (May 21, 2020), pp. 3, 5–6. Foner concludes (p. 6): "Rooted in distrust of ordinary citizens and, like so many other features of American life, in the institution ofslavery, the electoral college is a relic of a past the United States should have abandoned long ago."
• Foner, Eric,"Whose Revolution?: The history of the United States' founding from below" (review ofWoody Holton,Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, Simon & Schuster, 2021, 800 pp.),The Nation, vol. 314, no. 8 (18–25 April 2022), pp. 32–37. Highlighted are the struggles and tragic fates of America's Indians and Black slaves. For example, "In 1779 [George] 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, [Thomas] Jefferson ordered troops under the command ofGeorge Rogers Clark to enter theOhio Valley and bring about the expulsion or 'extermination' of local Indians." (pp. 34–35.)
• Foner, Eric, "The Little Man's Big Friends" (review ofJefferson Cowie,Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, Basic, 2022, 497 pp.,ISBN 978 1 5416 7280 2),London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 11 (1 June 2023), pp. 29–30. "More than half a century after he stood in the 'schoolhouse door', the ghost ofGeorge Wallace still haunts American politics." (final sentence of the review, p. 30.)
• (Additional articles and book reviews are available atEricFoner.com)

• Diggins, John Patrick (2002). "Fate and Freedom in History: The Two Worlds of Eric Foner".The National Interest (69):79–90.JSTOR 42895561.
• Smith, John David (2003). "Reviewed work: Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, Eric Foner".The North Carolina Historical Review.80 (3):400–401.JSTOR 23522901.
• "Book Reviews".The Public Historian.25 (1):91–109. 2003.doi:10.1525/tph.2003.25.1.91.JSTOR 10.1525/tph.2003.25.1.91.
• Katz, Jamie. "Freedom Writer: Pulitzer Prize-winning Columbia historian Eric Foner '63, '69 GSAS personifies the great teacher and scholar who approaches his calling with moral urgency,"Columbia College Today, Winter 2012–2013.online
• Snowman, Daniel, "Eric Foner",History Today Volume 50, Issue 1, January 2000, pp. 26–27.
• Kennedy, Randall, "Racist Litter" (review of Eric Foner,The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, Norton, October 2019,ISBN 978 0 393 65257 4, 288 pp.),London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 15 (July 30, 2020), pp. 21–23. Kennedy quotes Foner (p. 23): "A century and a half after the end of slavery, the project of equal citizenship remains unfinished."

Wikiquote has quotations related toEric Foner.

• EricFoner.com – Professor Foner's homepage
• Books written by Eric Foner or edited or introduced by him
• American Historical Association – Bibliography of Foner's Books
• Fathom Source for Online Learning Foner discusses influential history books he has read.
• Excerpt from Eric Foner essay on theJohn Sayles film,Matewan in the bookPast Imperfect: History According to the Movies edited by historian Mark C. Carnes
• The Left's Lion: Eric Foner's History – byRonald Radosh
• Expert report by Eric Foner for University of Michigan Affirmative Action cases
• A film clip"The Open Mind – A Historian's 'Story of American Freedom,' Part I (1999)" is available for viewing at theInternet Archive
• A film clip"The Open Mind – A Historian's 'Story of American Freedom,' Part II (1999)" is available for viewing at theInternet Archive

• Lectures from "The Civil War and Reconstruction" course series (videos):1850–1861,1861–1865,1865–1890
• Eric Foner lecture "Who Owns History?" from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar (audio recording)
• "The Story of American Freedom: 1776–2005" (video): MIT SPURS/Humphrey Program sponsored lecture by Eric Foner from the series "Myths About America."

• Interviews with Foner onDemocracy Now! about his 2015 bookGateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (et al.):
  • part 1, begins ~35:38 inaudio andvideo
  • part 2:audio,video
• "The Second American Revolution: Historian Eric Foner on slavery, freedom, and contemporary US politics".Jacobin. March 28, 2015.
• Appearances onC-SPAN
• On Contact: Creative Forgetfulness with Eric Foner (interviewed byChris Hedges). RT America on YouTube, September 18, 2017

• 1943 births
• 20th-century American historians
• 21st-century American historians
• Academics of the University of Cambridge
• American male non-fiction writers
• American people of Russian-Jewish descent
• Bancroft Prize winners
• Columbia College, Columbia University alumni
• Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
• Columbia University faculty
• Corresponding fellows of the British Academy
• Fellows of Oriel College, Oxford
• Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professors of American History
• Historians of race relations
• Historians of the Reconstruction era
• Historians of the Southern United States
• Jewish American historians
• Lincoln Prize winners
• Living people
• Members of the American Philosophical Society
• Presidents of the American Historical Association
• Pulitzer Prize for History winners
• The Nation (U.S. magazine) people

• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from May 2021
• Articles with hCards
• Articles with Internet Archive links
• People appearing on C-SPAN