Eric Foner

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric Foner, born on the 7th of February 1943 in New York City, is the historian that college professors reach for most often. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the single most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses across the United States. That is a remarkable position to occupy, and it raises a question: how does a physicist-in-training from Long Beach High School become the defining voice on America's most contested century? The answers run through a father who lost his livelihood to McCarthyism, a seminar on the Civil War that changed everything, and decades of work on a period most Americans would rather forget. Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the country tried to figure out what freedom actually meant, sits at the center of Foner's career. His reinterpretation of that period earned him the Pulitzer Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize in 2011 alone.

• 2. A Father's Lessons

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  Jack D. Foner, Eric's father, was a historian active in the trade union movement and the campaign for civil rights for African Americans. When McCarthyism cost Jack his academic livelihood, he supported the family as a freelance lecturer, and young Eric sat in the audience. From those lectures, Eric absorbed a way of thinking where Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois were as central to history as presidents and industrial magnates. He came to see how the repression of the McCarthy era echoed the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and how the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the century foreshadowed American intervention in Vietnam. Eric later described his father as his "first great teacher." That phrase carries weight: the elder Foner did not simply pass on knowledge. He modeled a politics of history, one in which a commitment to social justice shapes how you read the past. That sensibility would guide every major project Eric Foner undertook.

• 3. The Education That Redirected Him

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  Foner arrived at Columbia University as a physics major. A year-long seminar with James P. Shenton on the Civil War and Reconstruction, taken during his junior year, redirected him entirely. "It probably determined that most of my career has been focused on that period," he recalled years later. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in history in 1963, then went to Oxford on a Kellett Fellowship, earning a second BA from Oriel College in 1965. He was a member of the Oriel team that won the University Challenge in 1966, though he did not appear in the final, having already returned to the United States. Back at Columbia, he completed his doctoral degree in 1969 under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. His thesis, published in 1970 as Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, examined the ideals and interests that drove the northern majority to oppose slavery and resist Southern secession. That book set the intellectual terms for nearly everything that followed.

• 4. Rewriting Reconstruction

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  In October 1982, Foner published a seminal essay in American Heritage declaring that the traditional interpretation of Reconstruction, the one that had dominated historical writing for much of the century, had "irrevocably been laid to rest." Six years later, in 1988, he published Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, the book that historian Michael Perman called "a masterly account, broad in scope as well as rich in detail and insight." C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Review of Books, judged that Foner had brought greater cogency and power to the subject than anyone before him. David Herbert Donald, in The New Republic, called it "history written on a grand scale." The book won the Bancroft Prize in 1989, along with the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize. A later Foner book on Lincoln, The Fiery Trial, published in 2010, described by Library Journal as the most sensible and sensitive reading of Lincoln's lifetime involvement with slavery, added the Pulitzer Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and a second Bancroft Prize in 2011.

• 5. Controversies and Counterattacks

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  Not every reader accepted Foner's framing. Theodore Draper, reviewing The Story of American Freedom in the New York Review of Books, argued that telling the story of American freedom largely from the perspective of Black Americans and women would not produce a flattering portrait, and that most Americans had always believed themselves to be the freest people in the world. John Patrick Diggins of the City University of New York praised Reconstruction as "magisterial" and "moving," but pointed to what he saw as a tension: Foner's unforgiving assessment of America's racist past sat alongside notably different views on the fall of communism and Soviet history. Foner had, in the early 1990s, spent time as a visiting professor in Moscow, where he compared secessionist forces in the USSR to the secession movement of the 1860s. In a February 1991 article, he argued that the Baltic states claimed the right to secede because they had been unwillingly annexed, and that the Soviet Union had failed to protect minorities while pushing to nationalize its republics. Those comparisons drew their own lines in historical sand.

• 6. Public Historian

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  Foner's reach extended well beyond scholarly journals and university classrooms. He appeared on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show to discuss American history with general audiences. His Give Me Liberty! textbook series reached high school classrooms across the country. In a New York Times op-ed, he criticized President Donald Trump's call to preserve Confederate monuments, arguing those monuments represented and glorified white supremacy rather than collective heritage. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner was the first person to associate the storming of the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Washington Post credited him as "one of the most prolific, creative, and influential American historians of the past 20 years." His online courses on "The Civil War and Reconstruction," published through Columbia University on ColumbiaX in 2014, brought his classroom to anyone with an internet connection. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, published in 2015, was judged "intellectually probing and emotionally resonant" by the Los Angeles Times.

• 7. The Honors and What They Measure

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  The awards accumulated steadily across Foner's career. In 1989, he received the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. In 1991, Columbia's Society of Graduates gave him the Great Teacher Award. In 1995, the New York Council for the Humanities named him Scholar of the Year. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association. In 2009, the Governor of Illinois inducted him as a laureate of the Lincoln Academy and awarded him the Order of Lincoln, the state's highest honor, as a Bicentennial Laureate. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. In 2020, the Organization of American Historians awarded him the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award for contributions that significantly enriched the understanding of American history. He has been a member of the Columbia University Department of History since 1982, the same year he married historian Lynn Garafola. That unbroken four-decade tenure at one institution is itself a kind of statement about where Foner has always believed historical work belongs: close to students, and close to the archive.