#eric foner

[typhlonectes]

[protoslacker]

During my college and graduate student years, I was never once taught by a female or non-white historian—something all but impossible today. I look back with pride on the fact that the 75 or so historians whose dissertations I supervised during my own teaching career included numerous members of previously underrepresented groups, notably women and non-white men. Inevitably, changes in the historical profession have altered the ways we think about the American past.

Eric Foner in The Nation. The Education of a Historian

Freedom is neither a fixed idea, nor the story of progress toward a predetermined goal.

I don't know why I was surprised to learn today that Foner is 82 years old. The strangeness is a bit like seeing some musicians from my youth now when the picture of them in my mind is when they were young.

This is a wonderful essay about American history by an eminent historian who is also sharing personal history.

[roseredfingers]

We live at a moment in some ways not unlike the 1890s and early twentieth century, when state governments, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, stripped black men of the right to vote and effectively nullified the constitutional promise of equality. “Principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled,” Frederick Douglass observed, were “boldly assaulted and overthrown.” As history shows, progress is not necessarily linear or permanent. But neither is retrogression.      By themselves, the constitutional amendments that emerged from the Civil War cannot address all the legacies of slavery. Sumner remarked of the Thirteenth Amendment that rewriting the Constitution was not an end in itself but “an incident in the larger struggle for freedom and equality.” But the Reconstruction amendments remain, in the words of one Republican newspaper, “a declaration of popular rights.”  They retain unused latent power that, in a different political environment, may yet be employed to implement in new ways the Reconstruction vision of equal citizenship for all.

Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

[nofatclips]

Crash Course Black American History #15: The Underground Railroad

[howieabel]

Le bon historien n'est d'aucun temps ni d'aucun pays: quoiqu'il aime sa patrie, il ne la flatte jamais en rien.

History, however, is not a linear narrative of progress. Rights may be won and taken away; gains are never complete or uncontested, and popular movements generate their own countervailing pressures. - Eric Foner, "The Century: A Nation's-Eye View" (10 December 2002), The Nation

[furryalligator]

Historian Eric Foner spoke to my class with @arothmanhistory this past semester and one sentence really stuck out to me: "This history we were taught could not have produced the present we were living in." That's been on a note on my wall since and informs how I approach history.

— Ken HoHoHoman (@KenHomanSJ) January 3, 2021

[hummingbirdstudies]

🍉day 59🍉

Unsurprisingly, I was at Starbucks again today lol though I stuck to my water.

Honestly I didn’t get much homework done today.

I did read part of chapter 26 for APUS which we will be starting soon

I listened to some APUSH crash course videos, because, wow, that exam is coming up soon

I studied also a little for AP Psychology.

Other than that, I helped a friend with her prom outfit, went to the gym, and did some chore-like stuff.

4/23/19

[planetutah-blog]

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Eric Foner

"The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable."