Historian, born in New York City, New York, USA. He studied at Oxford, UK (1965 BA) and Columbia University (1969 PhD), and taught at Columbia (196973, 1982) and the City College of New York (197382). He soon gained prominence as a proponent of the new sociological approach to history, which he applied in such works as Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980), where he looked beneath the traditional explanations to posit control of African-American labour as the basic issue of Reconstruction.
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.
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. 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.
Jon Wiener, professor of history at the University of California, 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...
Eric Foner is married to Lynn Garafola, professor of dance at Barnard College and dance critic, historian, and curator. He was previously married to screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal.
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 is the best-selling author of Who Owns History?
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 from the Society of Columbia Graduates, and, in 1995, was named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. 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. "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.
Theodore Draper described Foner as "one of our most distinguished historians" and "a partisan of radical sects and opinions." 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." 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 the Iraq War. 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. "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). 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." - "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 &
"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. London Review of Books
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