Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eric Foner is best known for his scholarship on the Reconstruction era, particularly his 1988 book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. He is also the most frequently cited author on college history syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project, and his Give Me Liberty! textbook series is widely used in high school classrooms.
The Fiery Trial, published in 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize in 2011. The book examines Abraham Lincoln's lifetime involvement with slavery.
Eric Foner has been a member of the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He also completed his undergraduate degree and his doctorate at Columbia, earning his PhD in 1969 under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter.
Foner's first major book was Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, published in 1970. It began as his doctoral thesis and explored the ideals and interests that drove the northern majority to oppose slavery and resist Southern secession.
Foner credits his father, historian Jack D. Foner, as his "first great teacher." Jack Foner was active in the trade union movement and civil rights campaigns, and his freelance lectures after losing his academic position to McCarthyism shaped Eric's view that figures like Eugene V. Debs and W. E. B. Du Bois were as central to history as presidents. A junior-year seminar with James P. Shenton at Columbia also redirected Foner from physics to history and set his focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In a New York Times op-ed, Foner criticized President Donald Trump's call to preserve Confederate monuments, arguing that they represented and glorified white supremacy rather than collective heritage. He was also identified by historian Timothy Snyder as the first person to associate the storming of the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment.