I found it refreshing. I favor the left, but I like more intellectual debate than the academy can handle. Such blind spots make part of the book amusing and sad given current affairs, and also prophetic. Foner is sadly correct about the erosion of civil rights by the Supreme Court, yet he also does not see how scholarship such as his divides Americans and gives us Trump, who is only the overture to our collapse. So in 50 years, when New Orleans is no more and we have fought that civil war Foner and his ilk so crave, how will this book be seen?
As not left enough for failing to be even kinder to Marxism? As limited for not bringing up a few token women? An artifact of a leftist degeneracy that destroyed America? I guess it depends on who wins, the radical left or the racist right, but either way they will have their revisions of history, for all revision is at heart is deciding which parts to ignore.
Foner is as guilty as the men he condemns. For one, he seems to think the Civil War was not about union and nationalism, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary; Union newspapers, soldiers, and politicians brought up union and nation more than slavery. For that lack of self-awareness, I cannot recommend this book. To Foner, who should own history is clear enough: leftist progressives. It is a limited and dull answer, and the failure of that answer to deal with issues, such as freedom of speech, class, and economics, is being played out before our eyes.
View 2 comments. Jul 13, James rated it really liked it. Good about engaging with history. Jun 29, Tom Read rated it it was amazing. A deeply engaging collection of essays that are both insightful to the time in which they were written while also all lending insight to historical debates with which we are wrestling today. Really made me miss my college history classes. Dec 11, Sally Sugarman rated it really liked it.
This is an excellent book. It is a series of essays primarily written in the 90s but certainly quite prescient about what is happening now. He sees the race issue as central to what the United States is.
We have periods like Reconstruction followed by Redemption where the gains are undone in support of the status quo and of white males. He has a wonderful essay on who is an American, showing how the definition of who was a citizen was constantly restricted, no Indians of course, no blacks, no Asians and now no Hispanics. Women were reluctantly given the vote. The Civil War was really about slavery and the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were one of the best actions in our history that was fairly quickly undone, particularly by the Supreme Court that has usually acted as the most conservative element of the government, always siding with the powerful and the white male.
With rare exceptions the Supreme Court has ruled against the people, just as the Citizens United ruling did. To make the 13th and 14th amendments about the personhood of corporations is a travesty. It was just a family quarrel and the honorable warriors on both sides reconciled in while Woodrow Wilson ordered the segregation of federal offices in Washington D. At the end of the Civil War instead of opting for freedom, the country reverted to its worst instincts.
The westward expansion was Imperialism at its worst and when we had secured our Manifest Destiny, we went after world imperialism with the Spanish American War.
Earlier in the book, Foner talks about what happened to history when it became social history and included other groups of people. History is not a question of facts but of interpretation and of what facts are noted. He has a fine essay about why there is no socialism in the United States and suggests perhaps we are ahead of the game as the flaws of socialism began to show up around the rest of the world.
He does note that freedom means different things to people. For most Americans it focuses on the second amendment right to bear arms. A lot of people thought that we did not have socialism here because we did not emerge from a feudal class society, others that the frontier was always the safety valve. Hofstader was not a great lecturer but an excellent adviser and one of the outstanding historians of his generation according to Foner who recounts his own journey becoming an historian.
Foner also has a few interesting essays on how other countries rewrite their histories such as Russia and South Africa. The process of reconciliation in South Africa was a way of keeping the whites dominant after apartheid was over. It was called transitional history where the new group did not seek basic change, but an accommodation with the powerful. Foner notes that the quarrel in the U. He says that some of our progress in the fifties and the sixties was in contrast to what Hitler had done.
We were representing freedom that word again in contrast to the Nazis. To learn more about Copies Direct watch this short online video.
Need Help? How do I find a book? Can I borrow this item? Can I get a copy? Can I view this online? Ask a librarian. Walters ; consulting editor, Eric Foner. Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and other First Nations people are advised that this catalogue contains names, recordings and images of deceased people and other content that may be culturally sensitive. Book , Online - Google Books.
Table of contents Broken link? Publisher description Broken link? United States -- History -- Philosophy. United States -- Historiography. Foner examines the effects of international events on the historical consciousness. Essays discuss the historical impact of globalization, the end of South African apartheid, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also takes a retrospective look at his own earlier ideas and the work he did with premiere historian Richard Hofstadter.
In an age of semiotics and deconstruction, not to mention intense debate among historians about the prevailing ideas of the revolutionary era, there is something refreshingly naive, almost quaint, in the idea that any text, including the Constitution, possess a single, easily ascertainable, objective meaning. The Civil War and Reconstruction produced not simply three amendments but a fundamentally new Constitution.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, established a national citizenship whose rights, enforced by the federal government, were to be enjoyed equally by all Americans, and protected the right to vote of black men.
But as whole, these writings help to debunk the idea that history is irrelevant in the 21st century. View Full Version of PW. More By and About This Author. Buy this book.
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