Best Selling Books by Eric Foner

Freedom is the cornerstone of his sweeping narrative that focuses not only congressional debates and political treatises since the Revolution but how the fight for freedom took place on plantation and picket lines and in parlors and bedrooms.

From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War–a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era’s political and cultural meaning for today’s America. In Forever Free, Eric Foner overturns numerous assumptions growing out of the traditional understanding of the period, which is based almost exclusively on white sources and shaped by (often unconscious) racism. He presents the period as a time of determination, especially on the part of recently emancipated black Americans, to put into effect the principles of equal rights and citizenship for all. Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, he places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the Civil War, and–even more actively–in shaping Reconstruction and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. Foner makes clear how, by war’s end, freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment. He shows us that the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were retaliation for the progress made by blacks soon after the war. He refutes lingering misconceptions about Reconstruction, including the attribution of its ills to corrupt African American politicians and “carpetbaggers,” and connects it to the movements for civil rights and racial justice. Joshua Brown’s illustrated commentary on the era’s graphic art and photographs complements the narrative. He offers a unique portrait of how Americans envisioned their world and time. Forever Free is an essential contribution to our understanding of the events that fundamentally reshaped American life after the Civil War–a persuasive reading of history that transforms our sense of the era from a time of failure and despair to a threshold of hope and achievement.

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“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe 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.

This "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.

Give Me Liberty! is the #1 book in the U.S. history survey course because it works in the classroom. A single-author text by a leader in the field, Give Me Liberty! delivers an authoritative, accessible, concise, and integrated American history. Updated with powerful new scholarship on borderlands and the West, the Fifth Edition brings new interactive History Skills Tutorials and Norton InQuizitive for History, the award-winning adaptive quizzing tool. The best-selling Seagull Edition is also available in full color for the first time.

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner''s study looks beyond the North''s opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war''s start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party''s formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man''s right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation''s destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

Nothing But Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government and the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw an orderly transition from slavery to the creation of an almost totally dependent work force; and early twentieth-century southern and eastern Africa, where a self-sufficient peasantry was dispossessed in order to create a dependent black work force. Measuring the progress of freedmen in the post--Civil War South against that of freedmen in other recently emancipated societies, Foner reveals Reconstruction to have been, despite its failings, a unique and dramatic experiment in interracial democracy in the aftermath of slavery. Steven Hahn''s timely new foreword places Foner''s analysis in the context of recent scholarship and assesses its enduring impact in the twenty-first century.

One of the most misunderstood periods in American history, Reconstruction remains relevant today because its central issue -- the role of the federal government in protecting citizens'' rights and promoting economic and racial justice in a heterogeneous society -- is still unresolved. America''s Reconstruction examines the origins of this crucial time, explores how Black and white southerners responded to the abolition of slavery, traces the political disputes between Congress and President Andrew Johnson, and analyzes the policies of the Reconstruction governments and the reasons for their demise. America''s Reconstruction was published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the era produced by the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and the Virginia Historical Society. The exhibit included a remarkable collection of engravings from Harper''s Weekly, lithographs, and political cartoons, as well as objects such as sculptures, rifles, flags, quilts, and other artifacts. An important tool for deepening the experience of those who visited the exhibit, America''s Reconstruction also makes this rich assemblage of information and period art available to the wider audience of people unable to see the exhibit in its host cities. A work that stands along as well as in proud accompaniment to the temporary collection, it will appeal to general readers and assist instructors of both new and seasoned students of the Civil War and its tumultuous aftermath.

Insisting that politics and ideology must remain at the forefront of any examination of nineteenth-century America, Foner reasserts the centrality of the Civil War to the people of that period. The first section of this book deals with the causes of the sectional conflict; the second, with the antislavery movement; and a final group of essays treats land and labor after the war. Taken together, Foner''s essays work towards reintegrating the social, political, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century.

"Howard Fast makes superb use of his material. ... Aside from its social and historical implications, Freedom Road is a high-geared story, told with that peculiar dramatic intensity of which Fast is a master". -- Chicago Daily News

Since its publication in 1976, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America hasbeen recognized as a classic study of the career of the foremost politicalpamphleteer of the Age of Revolution, and a model of how to integrate thepolitical, intellectual, and social history of the struggle for Americanindependence.Foner skillfully brings together an account of Paine''s remarkable career witha careful examination of the social worlds within which he operated, in GreatBritain, France, and especially the United States. He explores Paine''s politicaland social ideas and the way he popularized them by pioneering a new form ofpolitical writing, using simple, direct language and addressing himself to areading public far broader than previous writers had commanded. He shows whichof Paine''s views remained essentially fixed throughout his career, whiledirecting attention to the ways his stance on social questions evolved under thepressure of events. This enduring work makes clear the tremendous impact Paine''swriting exerted on the American Revolution, and suggests why he failed to have asimilar impact during his career in revolutionary France. And it offers newinsights into the nature and internal tensions of the republican outlook thathelped to shape the Revolution.In a new preface, Foner discusses the origins of this book and the influencesof the 1960s and 1970s on its writing. He also looks at how Paine has beenadopted by scholars and politicians of many stripes, and has even been calledthe patron saint of the Internet.

“Gripping and essential.”—Jesse Wegman, New York Times An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.

A compilation of concise biographical data on some 1,400 Black public officials of the Reconstruction era (1865-1877). Foner draws on growing research in this area to portray the diversity of these lawmakers'' life experience, and to dispel dogged myths as to their fitness for office. An ample (21 p.) introduction provides an overview; five indexes offer access by state, occupation, birth status (free or slave), office held, and topic. Over 100 photographs (bandw), and 16 tables enhance this valuable document. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. 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.

In conjunction with a ten-year exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society, beginning January 1990.

The leading text in a brief, full-color edition. Clear, concise, integrated, and up-to-date, Give Me Liberty! is a proven success with teachers and students. Eric Foner pulls the pieces of the past together into a cohesive picture, using the theme of freedom throughout. The Brief Fourth Edition is streamlined and coherent, and features stronger coverage of American religion, a bright four-color design, and a reinforced pedagogical program aimed at fostering effective reading and study skills.

With a New Introduction From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prizewinning classic work on the post-Civil War period that 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 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 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.

The leading text in a brief, full-color edition. Clear, concise, integrated, and up-to-date, Give Me Liberty! is a proven success with teachers and students. Eric Foner pulls the pieces of the past together into a cohesive picture, using the theme of freedom throughout. The Brief Fourth Edition is streamlined and coherent, and features stronger coverage of American religion, a bright four-color design, and a reinforced pedagogical program aimed at fostering effective reading and study skills.

See why this is the most popular reader for the U.S. history course.

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.

Examines the origins of Reconstruction during the Civil War, explores how African-American and white Southerners responded to defeat and the destruction of slavery, and examines the policies of Reconstruction governments and the reasons for their overthrow.

An abridged version of the multiple award-winning Reconstruction: America''s unfinished revolution (1988). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Green Revolution recaptures the past thirty years of one of the most powerful movements in American history. The concern for the environment goes back more than a century, surely, but Kirkpatrick Sale shows that not until 1962, when Rachel Carson''s Silent Spring electrified the country, did we begin to realize the terrible danger of man-made threats to our natural world. Our national environmental organizations and leading scientists have given us a new lexicon: acid rain, toxic wastes, biodiversity, the greenhouse effect. Even the word "green" has taken on a new meaning. Tragic events - at Bhopal, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl - that once would have been thought of as ephemeral are unforgettable warnings. Congress has responded with major legislation to protect the land, our forests, wildlife, water, and the air we breathe. Even so, as Sale reminds us, these years have not been an unmitigated triumph. The perils to the earth remain and in some ways are even more ominous. But never in the annals of social change has a movement gained as much popular support, never has it had such legislative and regulatory impact, never has it become so embedded in an entire culture. It may not save the world, but what else will?

Selected readings shed new light on important events in black history and current developments in Negro protest movements