Eric Foner

Three years later, amid another national election, the American public is still slow to understand the enormity of January 6, 2021.

In early America, the soaring ideals behind establishing a new democracy were marked by cycles of progress and backlash.

These 1870s laws to protect Black voters, ignored for decades, now being used against Trump.

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

The controversial historian drew criticism from both left and right. We need more like him today.

An opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas exposed the limits of originalism.

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.

Leftists have regarded Lincoln as a pro-labor hero who helped vanquish chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today within the radical democratic tradition.

Largely forgotten today, Albion W. Tourgée’s legislation could have prevented Moore v. Harper.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.

Tying the fight for equal rights to the founders and the Constitution has worked before.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.

Unearthing the deep roots of racialized voter suppression—and explaining how they shape ballot access today.

Looking back at the short but deep friendship of John Brown and Harriet Tubman, who gave their lives to the abolitionist cause.

An accounting of racist murders in nineteenth-century America.

Did the Confederacy have a constitutional right to secede? And did Lincoln violate the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves?

Slavery’s a sensitive subject, but so is the question of who gets to be an authority about language.

West Point scholar argues ‘hazy, rosy’ myth shaped false sense of U.S. destiny.

As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.