Eric Foner

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.

Leftists have regarded Lincoln as a pro-labor hero who helped vanquish chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today within the radical democratic tradition.

Largely forgotten today, Albion W. Tourgée’s legislation could have prevented Moore v. Harper.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.

Tying the fight for equal rights to the founders and the Constitution has worked before.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.

Unearthing the deep roots of racialized voter suppression—and explaining how they shape ballot access today.

Looking back at the short but deep friendship of John Brown and Harriet Tubman, who gave their lives to the abolitionist cause.

An accounting of racist murders in nineteenth-century America.

Did the Confederacy have a constitutional right to secede? And did Lincoln violate the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves?

Slavery’s a sensitive subject, but so is the question of who gets to be an authority about language.

As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

The 19th-century antecedent to today’s complaints of labor shortage.

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

Stokely Carmichael and the speech that changed the course of the civil rights movement.

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

When I think about the 1870 riot, I remember how the country rejected the opportunity it had.

As Presidents' Day approaches, historians look back at the most notable recent uses and misuses of "the Great Emancipator's" words.