Eric Foner

"The New York Vigilance Committee was organized by free blacks working with white abolitionists to protect blacks from kidnappers and slave catchers on the streets. Soon such committees proliferated in the North, and began a collaboration known as the underground railroad. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown. Building on fresh evidence, Eric Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to history." --

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. Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. We see...

Contains nine essays, written between 1983 and 2001, in which the author considers the relationship between the historian and his or her world, discussing the politics of history and historians, the rethinking of history in a changing world, and depictions of the Civil War.

From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), 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...

Looks at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped the South after the Civil War.

Melvyn Leffler's succinct and important new analysis of the origins of the Cold War begins with the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917: ideological animosity between the Soviet Union and the United States existed from the moment Lenin seized power. Leffler traces the importance of the intricate connection between America's economic development and the growth of the U.S.S.R. as the world's other great power; in focusing on how America perceived...

"Over the course of our history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story is not the simple unfolding of a timeless truth, but an open-ended history of accomplishment and failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations and sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated and anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its meaning is shaped not only in congressional...