Eric Foner

Myths to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars.

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.

On the 14th amendment – and if it might stop Trump.

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

King offered Americans the choice between acting in accordance with the Constitution and resistance to change.  In many ways, we face the same choice today.

A new book seeks to explain why many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement for white people.

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

Today, the military is perhaps the largest integrated institution in the US. But how it came to be this way reveals a history of racism and resistance.

The crusade against civil liberties during World War I.

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.

A review of "C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian."

“It’s important to study history if you want to be an intelligent citizen in a democracy.”

A new book traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

In 'What It Took to Win,' Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’.

Woody Holton’s "Liberty is Sweet" charts not only the contest with Great Britain over “home rule” but also the internal struggle over who should rule at home. 

How the late 19th century’s raucous party system gave way to a sedate and exclusionary political culture that erected more and more barriers to participation.

The storming of the Capitol was an expression of the antidemocratic strands in American history.

The 14th Amendment offers a remedy that is both simpler and likelier to work.

But the belief that America previously had a well-functioning democracy is an illusion.

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

Eric Foner reviews two new books that make the case against the Electoral College.

How did the struggle for emancipation become a mass politics?