Eric Foner
American historian (born 1943)
Eric Foner (; born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks, such as the Give Me Liberty! series for high school classrooms. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses.
Foner has published several books on the Reconstruction period, starting with Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. His online courses on "The Civil War and Reconstruction", published in 2014, was available from Columbia University on ColumbiaX.
In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Foner previously won the Bancroft Prize in 1989 for Reconstruction. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Eric Foner” is american historian (born 1943). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Eric, Foner and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3056269. VIAF identifies the subject as 9861542. The Library of Congress control number is n80028592. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1982, 1863 and 1877.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eric Foner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.