Search results for ""Author Eric Foner""

The #1 U.S. history text with inclusive new coverage and improved support for student readers

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“These eloquent, compelling essays show why Lincoln was a man of his time and a man for all time. There is no better introduction to the complexities of his life and to why he still holds a spell over America and the world.”—Library Journal Among these original essays by prize-winning historians, James M. McPherson examines Lincoln’s deft navigation of the crosscurrents of politics and wartime strategy. Sean Wilentz elegantly explores Lincoln’s debt to the democratic political tradition of Jefferson and Jackson. Eric Foner examines Lincoln’s controversial position on the movement to colonize emancipated slaves outside the United States. James Oakes explores Lincoln’s views on the rights of African Americans. There are also brilliant essays on Lincoln and civil liberties, and on his literary style, religious beliefs, and family life.

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The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal but it took the Civil War and the adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed due process and the equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. By grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, the amendments marked the second founding of the United States. Eric Foner conveys the dramatic origins of these revolutionary amendments and explores the court decisions that then narrowed and nullified the rights guaranteed in these amendments. Today, issues of birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process and equal protection are still in dispute; the ideal of equality yet to be achieved.

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The #1 U.S. history text with inclusive new coverage and improved support for student readers

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From the “preeminent historian of Reconstruction” (New York Times Book Review), an updated abridged edition of Reconstruction, the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America.Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the quest of emancipated slaves’ searching for economic autonomy and equal citizenship, and describes the remodeling of Southern society; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and one committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.This “masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history” (New Republic) remains the standard work on the wrenching p

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More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.

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The #1 U.S. history text with inclusive new coverage and improved support for student readers

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Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politician grounded in principle, deftly navigating the dynamic politics of antislavery, secession, and civil war. Lincoln's greatness emerges from his capacity for moral and political growth.

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Newly Reissued with a New Introduction: From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans-black and white-responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period-an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.

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From the Revolution to our own time, freedom has been America's strongest cultural bond and its most perilous fault line, a birthright for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. Eric Foner takes freedom not as a timeless truth but as a value whose meaning and scope have been contested throughout American history. His sweeping narrative shows freedom to have been shaped not only in congressional debates and political treatises but also on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms, by our acknowledged leaders and by former slaves, union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights activists.

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An authoritative collection of Thomas Paine’s essential writings on American politics and governance—including the landmark Revolutionary War pamphlet, Common Sense After a life of obscurity and failure in England, Thomas Paine came to America in 1774 at age 37. Within fourteen months he published Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet of the American Revolution, and began a career that would see him hailed and reviled in the American nation he helped create. Collected in this volume are Paine's most influential texts. In Common Sense, he sets forth an inspiring vision of an independent America as an asylum for freedom and an example of popular self-government in a world oppressed by despotism and hereditary privilege. The American Crisis, begun during “the times that try men’s souls” in 1776, is a masterpiece of popular pamphleteering in which Paine vividly reports current developments, taunts and ridicules British adversaries, and enjoins his readers to remember the immense stakes of their struggle. They are joined in this invaluable reader by a selection of Paine’s other American pamphlets and his letters to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others.

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Follows centuries of New York activism to reveal the city as a globally influential machine for social change Activist New York surveys New York City’s long history of social activism from the 1650’s to the 2010’s. Bringing these passionate histories alive, Activist New York is a visual exploration of these movements, serving as a companion book to the highly-praised Museum of the City of New York exhibition of the same name. New York’s primacy as a metropolis of commerce, finance, industry, media, and ethnic diversity has given it a unique and powerfully influential role in the history of American and global activism. Steven H. Jaffe explores how New York’s evolving identities as an incubator and battleground for activists have made it a “machine for change.” In responding to the city as a site of slavery, immigrant entry, labor conflicts, and wealth disparity, New Yorkers have repeatedly challenged the status quo. Activist New York brings to life the characters who make up these vibrant histories, including David Ruggles, an African American shopkeeper who helped enslaved fugitives on the city’s Underground Railroad during the 1830s; Clara Lemlich, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who helped spark the 1909 “Uprising of 20,000” that forever changed labor relations in the city’s booming garment industry; and Craig Rodwell, Karla Jay, and others who forged a Gay Liberation movement both before and after the Stonewall Riot of June 1969. The city’s inhabitants have been at the forefront of social change on issues ranging from religious tolerance and minority civil rights to sexual orientation and economic justice. Across 16 lavishly illustrated chronological chapters focusing on specific historical episodes, Jaffe explores how New York and New Yorkers have changed the way Americans think, feel, and act.

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President Abraham Lincoln freed millions of slaves in the South in 1863, rescuing them, as history tells us, from a brutal and inhuman existence and making the promise of freedom and equal rights. This is a moment to celebrate and honor, to be sure, but what of the darker, more troubling side of this story? Slavery's Ghost explores the dire, debilitating, sometimes crushing effects of slavery on race relations in American history. In three conceptually wide-ranging and provocative essays, the authors assess the meaning of freedom for enslaved and free Americans in the decades before and after the Civil War. They ask important and challenging questions: How did slaves and freedpeople respond to the promise and reality of emancipation? How committed were white southerners to the principle of racial subjugation? And in what ways can we best interpret the actions of enslaved and free Americans during slavery and Reconstruction? Collectively, these essays offer fresh approaches to questions of local political power, the determinants of individual choices, and the discourse that shaped and defined the history of black freedom. Written by three prominent historians of the period, Slavery's Ghost forces readers to think critically about the way we study the past, the depth of racial prejudice, and how African Americans won and lost their freedom in nineteenth-century America.

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One of the great classics on democracy, Rights of Man was published in England in 1791 as a vindication of the French Revolution and a critique of the British system of government. In direct, forceful prose, Paine defends popular rights, national independence, revolutionary war, and economic growth - all considered dangerous and even seditious issues. In his introduction Eric Foner presents an overview of Paine's career as political theorist and pamphleteer, and supplies essential background material to Rights of Man. He discusses how Paine created a language of modern politics that brought important issues to the common man and the working classes and assesses the debt owed to Paine by the American and British radical traditions.

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In 1957, the University of Chicago Press asked acclaimed best-selling historian Daniel J. Boorstin to oversee a series of accessible yet authoritative books that, together, would tell the whole history of the American people. The result, published over the course of nearly half a century, is the "Chicago History of American Civilization" series, which provides a nuanced and vibrant portrait of the United States from its inception through the twentieth century. Scholars across many disciplines contributed, and the series covers a broad range of topics, as disparate as the War of 1812, immigration, and American folklore. While the series is certainly eclectic, the books share both ambition and authority - they have been staples for teachers and general readers alike. The authors included in this series represent some of the greatest academic talents ever to turn their mind to the American past. Thus the University of Chicago Press is excited to offer new editions of three of the series' best-known books. "Reconstruction after the Civil War" explores the role of former slaves during this period in American history. Looking past popular myths and controversial scholarship, John Hope Franklin uses his astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era. His arguments concerning the brevity of the North's occupation, the limited power wielded by former slaves, the influence of moderate Southerners, the flawed constitutions of the radical state governments, and the downfall of Reconstruction remain compelling today. This new edition of "Reconstruction after the Civil War" also includes a foreword by Eric Foner and a perceptive essay by Michael W. Fitzgerald.

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President Abraham Lincoln freed millions of slaves in the South in 1863, rescuing them, as history tells us, from a brutal and inhuman existence and making the promise of freedom and equal rights. This is a moment to celebrate and honor, to be sure, but what of the darker, more troubling side of this story? Slavery's Ghost explores the dire, debilitating, sometimes crushing effects of slavery on race relations in American history. In three conceptually wide-ranging and provocative essays, the authors assess the meaning of freedom for enslaved and free Americans in the decades before and after the Civil War. They ask important and challenging questions: How did slaves and freedpeople respond to the promise and reality of emancipation? How committed were white southerners to the principle of racial subjugation? And in what ways can we best interpret the actions of enslaved and free Americans during slavery and Reconstruction? Collectively, these essays offer fresh approaches to questions of local political power, the determinants of individual choices, and the discourse that shaped and defined the history of black freedom. Written by three prominent historians of the period, Slavery's Ghost forces readers to think critically about the way we study the past, the depth of racial prejudice, and how African Americans won and lost their freedom in nineteenth-century America.

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A new generation of scholars addresses the current themes and questions in interpreting American history

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The American companion to A History of the World in 100 Objects, a fresh, visual perspective on the Civil WarFrom a soldier’s diary with the pencil still attached to John Brown’s pike, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the leaves from Abraham Lincoln’s bier, here is a unique and surprisingly intimate look at the Civil War.Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer sheds new light on the war by examining fifty objects from the New-York Historical Society’s acclaimed collection. A daguerreotype of an elderly, dignified ex-slave; a soldier’s footlocker still packed with its contents; Grant’s handwritten terms of surrender at Appomattox—the stories these objects tell are rich, poignant, sometimes painful, and always fascinating. They illuminate the conflict from all perspectives—Union and Confederate, military and civilian, black and white, male and female—and give readers a deeply human sense of the war.

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