Forever Free, Eric Foner
Forever Free, Eric Foner
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Forever Free
The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

Author: Eric Foner

Narrator: JD Jackson

Unabridged: 11 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/11/2020


Synopsis

From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War—a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era’s political and cultural meaning for today's America.

Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the Civil War, and—even more actively—in shaping Reconstruction and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. Foner makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment.

He shows us that the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were retaliation for the progress made by blacks soon after the war. He refutes lingering misconceptions about Reconstruction, including the attribution of its ills to corrupt African American politicians and "carpetbaggers," and connects it to the movements for civil rights and racial justice.

About Eric Foner

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his BA and PhD. He has written a number of books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America, including Forever Free and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. His Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and remains the standard history of the period. In 2006, Eric received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Donald on May 12, 2020

Eric Foner is the preeminent historian on the United States period known as "Reconstruction". This is a very moving book for a history book of facts, dates and names. There are five sections by another author using visual communications to exhibit and elucidate the main text. There are huge and impo......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on February 18, 2019

Foner writes well. This is the first thing you should know. You will not be reading a dusty tome of long-ago lives. You will read about actual people from just a few short years ago, how they felt, how they struggled, what they wanted, what they hoped for. You will get in touch with these people, so......more

Goodreads review by Greg on September 04, 2013

RECOMMENDED! I read this book (Forever Free) just as I was completing the volume on the Civil War and Reconstruction by Page Smith (Trial by Fire: A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction). Mr. Foner's book is a much shorter read, but both he and Mr. Smith are primary source historians......more

Goodreads review by David on November 24, 2012

I recall believing much of the fiction the book sets out to discredit. Even as late as college I remember telling someone the Civil War wasn't really about slavery -- it was about economics and states rights. What I didn't realize then was that was code for slavery. The Union may have entered the Ci......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on June 29, 2020

If you are trying to decide whether this is a good book on Reconstruction History - the answer is yes. Check the book out at a library or purchase it. It is well-written and understandable. This book walks the reader through the time period around 1863 to the end of Reconstruction and into the early......more