Best Selling Books by Eric Foner

In thiscollection of polemical pieces, Foner expounds on the relevance ofAbraham Lincoln''s legacy in the age of Obama and on the need foranother era of Reconstruction. In addition to articles in which Fonercalls out politicians and the powerful for their abuse and misuseof American history, Foner assesses some of his fellow leadinghistorians of the late 20th century, including Richard Hofstadter,Howard Zinn and Eric Hobsbawm. Foner ends with an open letterto Bernie Sanders analysing the great tradition of radicalism thathe has spent his career studying and which, he argues, Americansof progressive disposition should seek to celebrate and retrieve.

"In American Colonies, historian Alan Taylor challenges the traditional Anglocentric focus of colonial history by exploring the many cultural influences that gave birth to America. The result is a superlative history of the prerevolutionary era in North America that is unprecedented in its scope and sure to become a landmark."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The grass-roots Populist movement that swept rural America a century ago millions of farmers and clusters of non-farmers into a powerful crusade to reshape the nation''s political economy by ushering in a "cooperative commonwealth" to reverse the growth of America''s monopoly capitalism. McMath crisply interprets the development of the Populist crusade from its early beginnings in the turbulent 1870s to its ultimate demise, and places it in a larger context as he compares it to later, parallel movements in the Great Plains and Canada.

For this new edition of American Reformers 1815-1860, Ronald G. Walters has amplified and updated his exploration of the fervent and diverse outburst of reform energy that shaped American history in the early years of the Republic. Capturing in style and substance the vigorous and often flamboyant men and women who crusaded for such causes as abolition, temperance, women''s suffrage, and improved health care, Walters presents a brilliant analysis of how the reformers'' radical belief that individuals could fix what ailed America both reflected major transformations in antebellum society and significantly affected American culture as a whole.

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.

Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its wake. In America''s westward expansion, labor unrest, newly powerful cities, and newly mechanized industries, the ideals and ideas by which Americans lived were reshaped, and American society became more structured, with an entrenched middle class and a powerful business elite. This is a brilliant, essential work on the origins of America''s corporate culture and the formation of the American social fabric after the Civil War.

«En un momento como el actual, en el que Estados Unidos continúa siendo la potencia mundial preeminente en materia militar, económica y cultural, aun a pesar de que su influencia internacional haya decrecido con motivo de la crisis económica global y de la impopularidad de las guerras norteamericanas en Irak y Afganistán, es más importante que nunca que en el extranjero se conozcan la historia y los valores de mi país» (Eric Foner, prólogo a la edición española).EE.UU. es, desde hace más de un siglo, la potencia hegemónica mundial. Sus valores e ideas sobre el mundo forman parte del discurso global. Una parte muy importante de nuestra visión de la realidad proviene de las reflexiones e impulsos de ese controvertido país. Alejado de los tópicos y con un profundo rigor crítico, este libro del profesor Foner, convertido ya en un clásico, indaga en origen democrático de los «padres fundadores» de EE.UU. y en la perversión política y militar que las diferentes administraciones, a lo largo de su historia y hasta la actualidad, han hecho de su ideal de libertad.

The leading U.S. history textbook, with a new focus on "Who is an American?"

The Reader''s Companion to American History offers a fresh, absorbing portrait of the United States from the origins of its native peoples to the nation''s complex identity in the 1990s. Covering political, economic, cultural, and social history, and combining hundreds of short descriptive entries with longer evaluative articles, the encyclopedia is informative, engaging, and a pleasure to read.

Recounts the placement of Japanese Americans in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and describes their reactions to this unjust action

The leading text in the U.S. survey course.

The World of the Worker illuminates workers'' lives at home, on the job, and in the voting booths. A new preface enhances this social, cultural, and political history: an unparalleled picture of working people during the turbulent rise and fall of the labor movement.

Traces the evolution of American sports from its early origins through the explosion and controversies of sports today

Assesses the impact of the Civil War

An essay looks at questions surrounding the Civil War era, including the regional differences in slavery, the impact of the Civil War on non-slaveholding whites, and the role of blacks during the conflict.