Eric Foner: Century

Eric Foner is American historian. Explore interesting quotes on century.

Eric Foner: 48 quotes0 likes

“America at the turn of this century is a far freer, more egalitarian society than in 1900.”

2000s, The Century: A Nation's-Eye View (2002)

“The United States was not the only nation to experience emancipation in the nineteenth century. Neither plantation slavery nor abolition were unique to the United States. But Reconstruction was.”

Eric Foner

1980s, The New View of Reconstruction (1983)

“Alone among the societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, for a moment, offered the freedmen a measure of political control over their own destinies.”

Eric Foner

1980s, The New View of Reconstruction (1983)

“Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. challenged the underlying premise of prevailing Civil War scholarship. The South, he pointed out, had shown no evidence of a willingness to end slavery; indeed, over time it had become ever more hysterical in its defense. With one eye firmly on the recent past, Schlesinger insisted that a society closed in support of evil could not be appeased, and if it was worth a war to destroy Nazism, surely it was worth one to eradicate slavery. But not until the 1960s, under the impact of the civil rights revolution, did historians en masse repudiate a half-century of Civil War scholarship, concluding that the war resulted from an irreconcilable conflict between two fundamentally different societies, one resting on slavery, the other on free labor. Historians pushed Emancipation to the center of their account of the Civil War, and it has remained there ever since.”

Eric Foner

"The Civil War in 'Postracial' America" https://web.archive.org/web/20111001073757/http://ericfoner.com/articles/101011nation.html (10 October 2011), The Nation <br class="br">2010s

“Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.”

Eric Foner

"The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/opinion/the-emancipation-of-abe-lincoln.html?ref=opinion&_r=0 (1 January 2013), The New York Times, New York <br class="br">2010s