Books by Eric Foner

The leading text, in a compact, value edition.

Provides the first comprehensive directory of the over 1,500 African Americans who held political office in the South during the Reconstruction era. The book presents an impressive amount of information about the antebellum status, occupations, property ownership, and military service of these officials.

From one of our most distinguished historians comes a groundbreaking new examination of the myths and realities of the period after the Civil War.Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on black experiences and roles during the era. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in shaping Reconstruction, and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. He compellingly refutes long-standing misconceptions of Reconstruction, and shows how the failures of the time sowed the seeds of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. Richly illustrated and movingly written, this is an illuminating and essential addition to our understanding of this momentous era.

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.

For almost four decades, Eric Foner, one of America's most distinguished historians, has introduced readers of his journalism to unknown or forgotten characters in American history, methodically unearthing the hidden history of American radicalism.

With a New IntroductionFrom 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 AmericaEric 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.

Features essays on intellectual history, the history of the West and the histories of the family and sexuality.