Eric Foner

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia and the author of many books on Reconstruction, including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Letter
Eric Foner writes: Norman Cantor’s comments about me do not deserve a reply. But since my late uncle cannot defend himself, it is worth noting that Philip Foner ‘couldn’t get’ an academic position not because of the quality of his books – many of which are today deemed indispensable for students of African-American and labour history – but because of McCarthy-era black-listing. Most Americans...
Letter

A Boost for Slavery

20 February 1997

The addition of a single word to my review of Original Meanings by Jack Rakove (LRB, 20 February) reversed the meaning of one of my sentences. This concerns the famous clause of the US Constitution providing that, along with free inhabitants, three-fifths of the slave population were to be counted when apportioning Congressmen among the states. As printed, the sentence stated that ‘only’ three-fifths...
Letter
Eric Foner writes: I have read and reread Theodore Draper’s letter and cannot discover what he is complaining about. In none of the three cases does his rebuttal invalidate my point. In fact, the passages he quotes from the book demonstrate the accuracy of my comments rather than refuting them.It hardly seems fair for Mr Draper, a frequent contributor to that outpost of Oxbridge in the Big Apple,...

Reconstruction was under attack from the outset. There was never a consensus on its legitimacy, and in the end it sank under the weight of racism, indifference, fatigue, administrative weakness, economic...

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A Topic Best Avoided: Abraham Lincoln

Nicholas Guyatt, 1 December 2011

On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond,...

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During the war and after the war

J.R. Pole, 11 January 1990

With the passing of generations, the Civil War will lose its chronological centrality in American history, and may well come to be regarded, not so much as the great crisis of the very principle...

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