In his most influential work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, published in 1988, he showed that the struggle for equality and freedom continued long after the Confederacy died, even if its victories were frustratingly incomplete. Inspired by the black freedom movement of the 1960s and its successors, he has demonstrated, perhaps more than any other historian of his generation, how central emancipation was to the political conflicts that eventually exploded into civil war. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.įoner has dedicated his career to demolishing these assumptions about how the Civil War happened and how the victors shaped what came after. Their view of Reconstruction tended to be even more wrongheaded, rendering a decade of biracial democracy as an era dominated by vengeful Yankees who headed south to stir up racial antagonisms, echoing the pro–Ku Klux Klan narrative of D.W. They claimed that the “war between the states” could have been avoided if sage voices of compromise had only been able to silence the hotheaded abolitionists and their secessionist counterparts. Yet until the 1960s, most influential scholars conceived of the era as a sad departure from America’s grand march of progress toward political liberty and economic plenty. Nothing has been more important to the development of American society and politics than the Civil War and Reconstruction. 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 america's unfinished revolution