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Eric Foner

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Eric Foner (born February 7, 1943 in New York City) is an American historian. He has been a faculty member in the department of history at Columbia University since 1982 and has written extensively on issues of race in American history, with particular emphasis on the Reconstruction period.

Contents

Biography

Appointed the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, Foner specializes in nineteenth century American history, the American Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction. He served as president of the Organization of American Historians in (1993-94), became President-elect of the American Historical Association in January 1999, and AHA president in 2000.

From 1973-1982, he served as a Professor in the Department of History at City College and Graduate Center at City University of New York.

Foner earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University in 1963, a second B.A. from Oriel College, Oxford, as a Kellett Fellow in 1965, and his Ph.D. in 1969, under the tutelage of Richard Hofstadter at Columbia.

His mother, Liza, was married to historian Jack D. Foner for 57 years. At Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Jack Foner established the first Black Studies program at a college in New England. Jack Foner was blacklisted in colleges and universities in the United States for nearly 30 years after declining to discuss his political preferences with a government committee. He supported his family partly by finding work as a musician and partly as a guest lecturer.

Jon Wiener, professor of history, University of California at Irvine, wrote that Eric Foner describes his father as his "first great teacher," and recalls how, "deprived of his livelihood while I was growing up, he supported our family as a freelance lecturer... . Listening to his lectures, I came to appreciate how present concerns can be illuminated by the study of the past—how the repression of the McCarthy era recalled the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the civil rights movement needed to be viewed in light of the great struggles of Black and White abolitionists, and in the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the century could be found the antecedents of American intervention in Vietnam. I also imbibed a way of thinking about the past in which visionaries and underdogs—Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, Eugene V. Debs, and W.E.B. DuBois—were as central to the historical drama as presidents and captains of industry, and how a commitment to social justice could infuse one's attitudes towards the past." [link]

Eric Foner is married to Lynn Garafola, [link] professor of dance at Barnard College and dance critic, historian, and curator. Their daughter is Daria Rose. He had previously been married to screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal[link].

Career

Foner serves on the editorial boards of Past and Present and The Nation. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, and other publications, and has appeared on television and radio, including Charlie Rose, Book Notes, and All Things Considered, and in historical documentaries on PBS and The History Channel. Foner also contributed an essay and conversation with John Sayles in "Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies" published by the Society of American Historians in 1995. He was the on-camera historian for Freedom: A History of US on PBS in 2003.

He is the best-selling author of Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World.[link]

Exhibitions

Foner was the co-curator, with Olivia Mahoney, of two prize-winning exhibitions on American history: A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln, which opened at the Chicago Historical Society in 1990, and America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War, which opened at the Virginia Historical Society in 1995 and traveled to several other locations. He revised the presentation of American history at the Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland, and has served as consultant to several National Park Service historical sites and historical museums.

Eric Foner served on the advisory board to the International Freedom Center, a museum proposed for the World Trade Center site but that did not come to fruition.

Prizes

In 1991, Foner won the Great Teacher Award[link] from the Society of Columbia Graduates, and, in 1995, was named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, and holds an honorary doctorate from Iona College. He has taught at Cambridge University as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, Oxford University as Harmsworth Professor of American History, and Moscow State University as Fulbright Professor.

Criticism

Foner's work has been praised by those at both ends of the political spectrum. Presidential advisor Karl Rove has described Foner as one of his favorite authors.[link] Journalist Nat Hentoff called his Story of American Freedom "an indispensable book that should be read in every school in the land."[link] "Eric Foner is one of the most prolific, creative, and influential American historians of the past 20 years," according to a write-up in the Washington Post. His work is "brilliant, important" a reviewer wrote in the Los Angeles Times. [link]

Theodore Draper described Foner as "one of our most distinguished historians" and "a partisan of radical sects and opinions."[link] John Patrick Diggins of the City University of New York describes Foner as "both an unabashed apologist for the Soviet system and an unforgiving historian of America."[link] Rightwing critic David Horowitz described as "anti-American" a Columbia University teach-in that Foner helped organize in 2003; Daniel Pipes named Foner among the "Profs who hate America" (for the historian's opposition to George W. Bush's Iraq war.[link] Bernard Goldberg opined that Foner is #75 in Goldberg's personal list of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America in 2005.

Foner, in turn, has asked conservatives why they appeal to racism. For example, in an article questioning why modern conservatives such as Gale Norton and John Ashcroft praise the Confederacy, Foner mentioned both cabinet members in the first administration of George W. Bush. He said, "Most Republicans appeal more subtly to white Southern voters. Ronald Reagan opened his 1984 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were slain; George W. Bush sent a message by speaking at Bob Jones University. Lauding the Confederacy is part of this symbolic politics." [link]

Journalist Kevin C. Murphy assesses Foner's contributions in the following way. "Beloved by undergraduates and reviled by right-wing ideologues, Columbia University's Eric Foner is arguably the world's foremost authority on the tumultuous period of American Reconstruction (1865-1877). Taking a page from W.E.B. Du Bois's often overlooked 1935 work Black Reconstruction, Foner's work definitively overthrew the racist apologia and Redeemer discontent of the Dunning School, which had argued for decades that Reconstruction was a cataclysmic morass of misgovernment, corruption, and ineptitude visited upon the defeated South by a vengeful cabal of Northern politicians. Instead, Foner placed newly freed Africans-Americans at the center of the post-Civil War story and, in so doing, illustrated the brief moments of political and social possibility available for Southern blacks before the racial and economic discrimination of Jim Crow was enthroned throughout the "New South." " [link]

Quotations

"Like all momentous events, September 11 is a remarkable teaching opportunity. But only if we use it to open rather than to close debate. Critical intellectual analysis is our responsibility—to ourselves and to our students." - "Rethinking American History in a Post-9/11 World" [History News Network]

"[S]uccessful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history." - Eric Foner, Who Owns History? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2002), page 7.

"In a global age, the forever-unfinished story of American freedom must become a conversation with the entire world, not a complacent monologue with ourselves." - "American Freedom in a Global Age" Presidential Address to the [American Historical Association annual meeting] January 2001.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001: "It was a rare commentator indeed who pointed out that Osama bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalists of Afghanistan were trained and armed by our side during the 1980s or that the list of states that harbour terrorism include some close allies of the United States." [London Review of Books]

Works by Foner

Articles

Books (Partial Listing)

Some of his books have been translated into Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese.

Reference

External links

 

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