Moreover, the author believes that that the concept of freedom is contested as different individuals or groups many impart different meanings. How can one learn anything about history at all if one flinches away from those times We did bad things? That’s an interesting thing for American culture to denigrate. According to this point of view, which is not taught in schools anymore I don’t think, but is still widely accepted by people who were educated maybe a generation ago, President Lincoln, at the end of the Civil War, just before he was assassinated, wanted to bring the defeated South back into the Union in a lenient and quick manner. Originally broadcast Jan. 9, … Therefore, any effort to give African Americans back their right to vote, which was taken away around 1900, would just lead to another reconstruction. Presided over by carpet baggers, that is Northerners who went down to the South to reap the spoils of office, and scalawags, who were white Southerners who cooperated with these governments. Anyone who attended high school before 1960 learned that Reconstruction was an era of unrelieved sordidness in American political and social life. In a nutshell, in a very brief summary, that view saw reconstruction after the Civil War as the lowest point. That seemed unremarkable to me then, and it seems unremarkable to me now (cf. October/November 1983. No doubt generations of teachers taught Reconstruction from those drastically wrong textbooks without having an agenda, but the mistakes were deeply ideological. Either because of his hatred for the South or from another point of view, the desire to fasten the grip of Northern capitalism on the South. For many, many years, certainly into the, well past the middle of the 20th century, what we call the old or standard view of reconstruction dominated historical writing and textbooks and popular thinking. Because black people, according to this view, are inherently incapable of intelligently exercising political rights, there followed an orgy of corruption and misgovernment in the South. There’s no other era of American history where the same view was dominant in 1900 as in 1960, let’s say. (Music) The history is not taught that way any more. The people who carried out Redemption had ideology enough for all of them. By Eric Foner. ERIC FONER: Well, it ended in a political bargain in 1876. You can kind of understand why teachers would want to take the easy way out. The New View of Reconstruction Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post–Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study Eric Foner I n the past twenty years, no period of American history has been the subject of a more thoroughgoing reevaluation than Re-construction—the violent, dramatic, and “Scalawag” isn’t used all that often, I suppose — it’s rather an old-timey insult, something that Mr. Burns has probably said on The Simpsons — but “carpetbagger” remains in use when referencing politicians who move to new constituencies. : Good evening. It’s interesting how those terms have survived to remain insults today. I took American History in high school. But as usual in America, race trumps everything, and any Northerner who moved to the South and didn’t adopt the Lost Cause was to be viewed with contempt. He is one of only two persons to serve as President of the Organization of American Historians, American … He has published many scholar papers are, Compare And Contrast The Military Conquest Of Mesoamerican Americans. I agree with Eugene D. Genovese that the left needs to rethink some of its premises. Response: Eric Foner Response: Eric Foner Eric Foner ▪ Fall 1984. Listener discretion is advised. That’s our job, we’re always trying to prove the guy who came before us as wrong. The Politics of Andrew Johnson. His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. and Ph.D.In his teaching and scholarship, Foner focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. (Redemption was the fancy label for the reimposition of slavery in all but name.). In addition, DAN GORMAN [Opening Narration]: The following program contains strong language and disturbing thematic content. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery By James Oakes The Nation, February 5, 2007 . Eventually, groups like the Ku Klux Klan decided enough was enough and overthrew these governments and restored what was politely called home rule, or what we should really call white supremacy, in the Southern states. Iraq war). This was true of reconstruction. That certainly wasn’t taught in my school. One, it was a mistake to give black men the right to vote. Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction is a shortened version of his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877; however, in the shorter version certain broad themes unified the crucial narrative. Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. Foner is one of the major figures in that change. A: By the 1830's, what we call the Age of Jackson, slavery was really entrenched in many ways: in the economy and politics and the whole social life of the American nation. The historian Eric Foner from a talk at Swarthmore in 2013:. Years ago I was having dinner with some people at an academic conference and asked why in the UK the long eighteenth century, which is crucial for understanding the political and economic structures in place today, is virtually ignored in the national curriculum (my first-year university history students had the Tudors, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and World War II, and that’s about it–I remember one young man had the Nazis for history four years in a row) and someone said ‘we can’t teach the long eighteenth century because that’s when Britain did bad things.’ How are we going to engage a class, particularly a multicultural class, in critical thinking about slavery, colonialism, and the exploitation of industrialisation? His first theme is the midst of the black experience, second theme is to trace the ways Southern society as a whole was remodeled, third theme is the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the fourth theme is the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction, In Eric Foner’s book, The Story of American Freedom, he writes a historical monograph about how liberty came to be. The low point in the whole saga of American democracy. I totally agree–particularly THOSE bad things, which continue to have profound effects on how we live our lives–but I can see most teachers thinking it’s above their pay grade to cope with the fallout. Our guest, Eric Foner, is a professor of history at Columbia University who's been writing about America's complicated racial history for decades. profile of eric foner in columbia college today, 2012-13. interview with eric foner about his book, gateway to freedom. In this book Dubois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." columbia and slavery website, including eric foner's report . My name is Dan Gorman. Field Lecture in History, "The Significance of Reconstruction in American History." I heard the curator of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich speak once about the exhibit they hosted about slavery, and he described a lot of complaints from Black parents whose children were coming home upset, and with awkward questions. I think the entire last third of the 19th century got blasted through in a week. For nearly half a century, Eric Foner has been challenging and overturning the benighted assertions made about the most studied and contentious period in US history. Reconstruction proved that black men are not capable of voting because they misused the vote. Good grief. “Carpetbaggers” from the North aided by opportunistic Southern “scalawags” came to take advantage of the recently defeated South. People took “Gone With the Wind” – both novel and movie – seriously for years without having the faintest idea that it had a white supremacist story at its core. Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. “Ok, so the Civil War was over, and there was Reconstruction to bring the rebel states back in the Union, and they passed some constitutional amendments banning slavery and such. Eric Hobsbawm replaced narratives about the making of the modern world that focused relentlessly on the political games played by powerful men with … It may be too strong to say that Eric Foner, an eminent historian, reshaped the general view of Reconstruction. 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