Watch Eric Foner's Civil War Course Part I Here at CivilWarTalk

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Featured Book Reviewer
Joined
Jan 7, 2013
Location
Long Island, NY
Columbia University Professor Eric Foner is one of the best known historians of the Civil War Era. Although best known for his Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 which won the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize, he is also the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Bancroft Prize.

Foner is offering three free courses over the next year on the Civil War Era, covering the coming of the war, the war itself, and Reconstruction. You can take the three courses through EdX for free. EdX is the MOOC for Harvard, MIT, and Columbia, as well as a few other schools. Here is the link to EdX:

https://www.edx.org/

Right now the lectures are also available on Youtube. I will post them here in order as they become available. If you know Foner's work, you know that the background to his career is his family's involvement in radical politics and scholarship. His opinions are bound to rile some folks. I hope you enjoy the lectures as I put them up and I hope you will comment, criticize, and applaud his talks.
 
Last edited:
Thanks, Mr. Young, for starting a thread for this course. I got a late start on Week 1, so trying to play catch up. Audit only, as I don't have time for discussions and other writing.
 
Thanks, Mr. Young, for starting a thread for this course. I got a late start on Week 1, so trying to play catch up. Audit only, as I don't have time for discussions and other writing.
Me too. The course has been fun so far. He is engaging in a very New York way. I would imagine that his approach will grate on some, but his lectures usually range from Ivy League to New York streets in style.
 
Last edited:
Here is Wiki's list of books by Foner:

  • Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995 [1970]. ISBN 0-19-509497-2. Reissued with a new preface.
  • America's Black Past: A Reader in Afro-American History. New York: Harper & Row. 1970.,editor
  • Nat Turner. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1971. ISBN 0-13-933143-3., editor
  • Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-19-501986-5.
  • Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1980. ISBN 0-19-502781-7.
  • Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1983. ISBN 0-8071-1118-X.
  • Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row. 1988. ISBN 0-06-015851-4. Political history; and winner, in 1989, of the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize.
  • A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row. 1990. ISBN 0-06-096431-6. An abridgement of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.
  • A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln. with Olivia Mahoney. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society. 1990. ISBN 0-393-02755-4.
  • The Reader's Companion to American History. ed. with John A. Garraty. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. 1991. ISBN 0-395-51372-3., editor
  • The Tocsin of Freedom: The Black Leadership of Radical Reconstruction. Gettysburg, Pa.: Gettysburg College. 1992.
  • Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. ISBN 0-19-952266-9.
  • America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War. with Olivia Mahoney. New York: HarperPerennial. 1995. ISBN 0-06-055346-4.
  • Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (rev. ed. ed.). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1996. ISBN 0-8071-2082-0.
  • The New American History (rev. ed. ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1997. ISBN 1-56639-551-8., editor
  • The Story of American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton. 1998. ISBN 0-393-04665-6.
  • Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. New York: Hill and Wang. 2002. ISBN 0-8090-9704-4.
  • Give Me Liberty!: An American History. New York: W.W. Norton. 2004. ISBN 0-393-97872-9. A survey of United States history, published with companion volumes of documents,
  • Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, ISBN 0-393-92503-X (vol. 1), and ISBN 0-393-92504-8 (vol. 2).
  • Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Knopf. 2005. ISBN 0-375-40259-4.
  • Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and his World. New York: W.W. Norton. 2008. ISBN 0-393-06756-4.
  • The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton. 2010.
 
Columbia University Professor Eric Foner is one of the best known historians of the Civil War Era. Although best known for his Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 which won the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize, he is also the Pulitzer Prize winning The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Bancroft Prize.

Foner is offering three free courses over the next year on the Civil War Era, covering the coming of the war, the war itself, and Reconstruction. You can take the three courses through EdX for free. EdX is the MOOC for Harvard, MIT, and Columbia, as well as a few other schools. Here is the link to EdX:

https://www.edx.org/

Right now the lectures are also available on Youtube. I will post them here in order as they become available. If you know Foner's work, you know that the background to his career is his family's involvement in radical politics and scholarship. His opinions are bound to rile some folks. I hope you enjoy the lectures as I put them up and I hope you will comment, criticize, and applaud his talks.


Thank you Pat !!

Respectfully,

William
 
In for a penny, in for a pound. Pat this is very good so far so don't quit now. I've read several of his works and I'll have to say, for me at least, his speaking style is easier to follow than his writing. He hasn't gotten very far before I have started disagreeing with some of his views but I'm still interested in what he's saying. Thanks for posting and keep up the good work.
 
There's so much in there that's succinct, understandable, and quotable:

If you look at the nation at the time of the American Revolution, there's no North and no South, actually. Slavery existed in all the colonies, or the 13 states that became independent, and although there were differences, their economies were both largely agricultural. And there wasn't this sharp, sectional divide. But the market revolution actually encourages a line between North and South. Now, I will be saying many a time - North and South are not units. There are divisions within the North divisions within the South.

It's not just one monolith against another. Nonetheless, the Market Revolution in the North stimulates great economic diversification. It stimulates urban development. It stimulates factory development. It stimulates, as I say, the development of commercial agriculture. The North goes through a major economic transformation between let's say 1820 and 1860. The South does not. The market revolution in the South simply reinforces and reinforces the system which had existed in 1800 of slavery. The percentage of people working in agriculture in the South in 1860 is the same as in 1800, about eighty-two percent. In the North it has gone down to less than 50 percent. So the North is developing economically. The South is expanding economically but not changing. So a gap is widening between them because of the contradictory impact of the Market Revolution.​
 
In for a penny, in for a pound. Pat this is very good so far so don't quit now. I've read several of his works and I'll have to say, for me at least, his speaking style is easier to follow than his writing. He hasn't gotten very far before I have started disagreeing with some of his views but I'm still interested in what he's saying. Thanks for posting and keep up the good work.
I don't doubt that there will be a lot to disagree with. He is opinionated and not shy about expressing his thoughts.
 
Thanks for the information, Pat.

I have a lot of painting to do and will look forward to watching Foner on the TV that has no cable hookup.
 
Back
Top