Eric Foner

摘要

Eric Foner is De Witt Professor of History at the University of Columbia. Born in New York City to a family that included union organisers, political activists, and historians – his father Jack was a scholar of the labour and civil rights movements – Foner has went on to become one of the leading historians of his generation. His most recent book, for example, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize, while he has been one of only two figures to have been elected to be President of both the American Historical Association and the Organisation for American Historians. Previous works have included Free Soil, Free Labour, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Revolution (1970), Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), and The Story of American Freedom (1998). While two strands run throughout his intellectual trajectory, the first being the abolition and legacy of slavery, it is the second theme that I wish to take up here.