Eric Foner

Eric Foner is an American historian whose scholarship examines slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the changing meaning of American freedom.

Reconstruction era: The period after the American Civil War when the United States debated emancipation, citizenship, and the reintegration of the former Confederacy. This is the historical period at the center of Foner’s best-known scholarship.
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877: Eric Foner’s 1988 history of Reconstruction, emphasizing the era’s political conflicts and transformations in freedom and citizenship. This landmark book presents his influential interpretation of Reconstruction as a revolutionary but unfinished transformation.
W. E. B. Du Bois: An American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who wrote Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois’s account of Reconstruction anticipated arguments Foner later helped restore to historical debate.
Dunning School: An influential early twentieth-century interpretation that portrayed Reconstruction governments as corrupt and Black political participation as disastrous. Foner’s work directly rejects its racist assumptions and negative account of Reconstruction.
Historiography of Reconstruction: The changing interpretations historians have produced about Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Foner helped overturn older accounts and establish a more favorable assessment of Reconstruction’s democratic achievements.
Emancipation: The ending of slavery, especially the liberation of enslaved people during and after the American Civil War. Foner studies emancipation as a contested process that reshaped freedom and political power.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery: Eric Foner’s 2010 study of Abraham Lincoln’s changing views on slavery and emancipation. It applies Foner’s attention to political change to Lincoln’s evolving antislavery commitments.
James M. McPherson: An American historian known for scholarship on the Civil War and its causes. McPherson and Foner are prominent historians whose work examines slavery and the Civil War from complementary angles.
Lost Cause of the Confederacy: A post-Civil War ideology that romanticized the Confederacy and minimized slavery’s role in the war. Foner’s scholarship counters its minimization of slavery and its distortion of Reconstruction.
Black Reconstruction in America: W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 history arguing that Black people were central agents in Reconstruction. Foner’s reassessment echoes and extends Du Bois’s recovery of Black political agency.

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Richard HofstadterBroader topic: Foner studied with Hofstadter and became a prominent historian of U.S. political change.