American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Columbia University professor and AAS member Eric Foner (elected 1989) will discuss his groundbreaking and definitive 1988 book, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. This work won the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize. Reviews of this work when it first appeared called it a “history written on a grand scale, a masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history." In the tradition of the Baron Lecture—named in honor of Robert C. Baron, the past chairman of the AAS Council—Foner will reflect on writing this work and the book’s impact on scholarship and society in the years since its first appearance.
Foner is the author of ten other works, including: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970); Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976); Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980); A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (1990); Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (1994); The Story of American Freedom (1998); and Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002). His book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.