Eric Foner

""History," wrote James Baldwin, "does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."". "Rarely has Baldwin's insight been more forcefully confirmed than in our current conflict-ridden times. History itself has become a matter of public controversy as Americans clash over the way it is represented in museums, in the flying of the Confederate flag, or in the proposals for paying reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it?". "In Who Owns History? Eric Foner proposes his answers to these and other questions about the historian's relationship to the world of the past and the future. He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking historian Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades - globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa - and their effects on historical consciousness. He concludes with new considerations of the enduring but often misunderstood legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction."--BOOK JACKET.

With Freedom's Lawmakers, Eric Foner has assembled the first comprehensive directory of the over 1,500 African Americans who held political office in the South during the Reconstruction era. He has compiled an impressive amount of information about the antebellum status, occupations, property ownership, and military service of these officials - who range from U.S. congressmen to local justices of the peace and constables. This revised paperback edition also includes material on forty-five additional officials. In his Introduction, Foner analyzes and interprets the roles of the black American officeholders. Concise biographies, in alphabetical order, trace the life histories of these individuals - many previously unknown. This useful and informative volume also includes an index by state, by occupation, by office during Reconstruction, by birth status, and by topic.

Chronicles how Americans responded to the changes unleashed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. An abridged version of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, Frank and Harriet Owlsley Award, and Lionel Trilling Prize.

Reprints of contemporary sources.

The first essay examines the aftermath of slavery in Haiti and the British Caribbean, and also looks briefly at early twentieth-century racial and economic relations in southern and eastern Africa; The second essay turns to how the issues and patterns prevalent in the Caribbean and Africa were duplicated in the postemancipation United States; The third essay examines a specific set of events during American Reconstruction, the strikes of rice workers along the Combahee River in South Carolina, to illustrate how many issues were resolved at the local level. The purpose of this book, then, was to examine crucial aspects of the forging of a new social order in the aftermath of slavery.--Excerpted from the Introduction pp. 1-3.

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. Taken together, the essays work towards reintegrating the social, political, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century.

A critical biography of the Revolutionary pamphleteer, exploring the origins, expression, and impact of his ideas and the place of his radical ideology in the eighteenth-century world.

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. Foner presents fresh information -- including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.

xv, 450 pages ; 21 cm

Encyclopedia of the United States from the origins of its native people to the 1990s. Covers political, economic, cultural, and social history.

When Matthew Wallingham returns home after being blinded in the war, he tries to save the family farm, make peace with his resentful family, and find happiness with the woman he loves.